Culture & Media

Culture and Gender

The basic assumption: if a behaviour or characteristic is universal, i.e. if develops similarly across all cultures we assume it must be determined biologically.

If characteristics such as gender vary from culture to culture it seems fair t assume that culture and socialisation is having an impact.  Hence we have the traditional nature/nurture debate.

Cultural differences
Mead (1935) studied three tribes in New Guinea.  She described her findings in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)

Mead found a different pattern of male and female behavior in each of the cultures she studied, all different from gender role expectations in the United States at that time.

• Arapesh: a temperament for both males and females that was gentle, responsive, and cooperative.
• Mundugumor (now Biwat), both males and females were violent and aggressive, seeking power and position.
• Tchambuli (now Chambri), male and female temperaments were distinct from each other, the woman being dominant, impersonal, and managerial and the male less responsible and more emotionally dependent.

Mead believed that with such different gender roles existing between different cultures that these roles must be culturally determined.

While Mead’s contribution in separating biologically-based sex from socially-constructed gender was groundbreaking, she was criticized for reporting findings that seemed custom-made for her theory. For Mead, each culture represented a different type within her theory, and she downplayed or disregarded information that may have made her simple classifications untenable.

Mead herself, later admitted that she may have under-played universal factors present in the tribes she had studied whilst over-emphasising their cultural expression.

Later researchers believe Mead had become too involved in her own research and allowed her expectations to influence her observations and conclusions.

Freeman (nearly fifty years later) observed the same tribes and concluded that Mead had been misled by the people she had studied.  Others have questioned Freeman on the same grounds.

Observation
We have looked at the dangers of participant observations, when researchers become part of the group that they’re studying.  Clearly the researcher is liable to have an impact on group dynamics.  There is also the possibility that, as you become part of that group, that objectivity and impartiality could be negatively impacted.

Imposed Etic
Most cross-cultural research is conducted by Western psychologists and social scientists.  They develop their initial ideas based on Western culture and then impose their models and theories on others.  It has been suggested that research teams working in other cultures should employ at least one person from the local culture. A person who is better able to interpret the behaviour observed within the cultural context and hopefully avoid misinterpretation and reduce bias.

Buss (1995) did do this and reported universal cross-cultural evidence for gender-based mate selection in 37 countries.  Men prefer young and fertile, women seek older with resources.

Media and Gender

The media offers role models for a whole range of behaviours.  We saw this with anorexia and with addiction and it is certainly true of gender too.

We have already seen that children look for role models with whom they can identify; this includes models of the same gender behaving in gender-appropriate ways.

The media often presents rigid stereotypical role models in continuous dramas, soap operas, films, magazines and TV advertisements. Typically men are represented as independent, ambitious and powerful, women as dependent, unambitious and weak.  Although we like to think this portrayal has improved over the decades Bussey and Bandura were still finding it present at the end of the twentieth century.

However, the media, when faced with this criticism will argue that it is merely representing real life.  We therefore have the age-old issue of cause and effect.  To what extent is media portrayal of gender roles creating gender differences and to what extent is it merely reflecting what already exists?

It is impossible to carry out lab-based research in this area and natural experiments in which a group of people exposed to media images is compared to a similar group who hasn’t is also difficult.  We are all exposed to media images from a very early age.  What we really need is another Fiji study.  As luck would have it…

The Notel experiment
Williams et al (1986) studied a town in the Canadian Territory of British Columbia.  It was remote and up until that point the residents had never been exposed to television.  The researchers found two other towns, Unitel (which only had one TV channel) and Multitel (which had many).  These towns would act as comparison groups.

On their first visits the researchers found that the inhabitants of Notel and Unitel had fewer gender stereotyped behaviours.  After the introduction of television, Notel’s inhabitants were demonstrating far much stereotyped behaviours.

However, the fact that this is a natural experiment should immediately set your AO3 antennae twitching.  There is very little control over extraneous variables.  A whole range of other factors might have changed in the intervening years.  It also only considers the role of television.  Notel’s inhabitants would have been exposed to other forms of media prior to television and this would also have continued afterwards.