Issues in PsychologyThroughout your studies certain issues have been considered repeatedly: gender, culture, and ethics. In this chapter you have the opportunity to reflect on these issues in relation to your studies so far.Ask yourself Is it justifiable if a theory is based on male behaviour only and then applied to all human behaviour? Which is preferable: to regard men and women as being psychologically different, or as the same? How can we make comparisons between cultures without being biased by our own cultural assumptions? What do psychologists think about the concept of “race”? How can we balance the needs of the individual against the needs of society? Do the ends justify almost any means? Is current legislation sufficient to protect non-human animals? What are the differences between humans and non-human animals?GENDER BIASThe term “bias” is used to suggest that a persons or societys views are distorted in some systematic way. In psychology, there is evidence that gender is presented in a biased way and this bias leads to a misrepresentation of women. Consider the following example. The performance of participants in psychological research tends to be influenced by the expectations of the investigator. Many people still have lower expectations for women than for men. This would lead us to collect data that show poorer task performance in women (for example, on a memory task). Research data are used to formulate theories and these theories may well be gender biased because of the baseline data. In this Section we will explore different areas and aspects of gender bias, and how this affects psychological knowledge.Gender StereotypesThere are many popular (and misleading) stereotypes about the differences between the sexes. For example, it has often been claimed that women are more emotional than men. This was expressed poetically by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:Man for the sword and for the needle she: Man with the head and woman with the heart.It is fully accepted that that is a gross oversimplification of reality. However, it is worth mentioning that females typically score significantly higher than males on measures of negative affectivity (a personality dimension relating to the experience of negative emotions such as anxiety and depression) (e.g., Denollet, 2005).Stereotypes about gender have been fairly common in psychology as well as in society at large. One of the worst offenders was Sigmund Freud. He argued that anatomy is destiny, meaning that there are great psychological differences between men and women because of their anatomical differences. For example, Freud claimed that young girls suffer from “penis envy” when they find out that boys have a penis but they dont.The greatest difficulty lies in distinguishing “real” from culturally created gender differences. There are some real differences, or at least that was the conclusion reached by Maccoby and Jacklin (1974) in a review of research on sex differences (see Eysencks A2 Level Psychology Chapter 7, Gender). They concluded that there were only four differences between boys and girls for which there was strong evidence. This is a much smaller number of gender differences than would have been predicted by most psychologists. The four differences identified by Maccoby and Jacklin were as follows: Girls have greater verbal ability than boys. Boys have greater visual and spatial abilities than girls (e.g., arranging blocks in specified patterns). Boys have greater arithmetical ability than girls, but this difference only appears at adolescence. Girls are less aggressive than boys: this is found in nearly all cultures, and is usually present from about 2 years of age.Most of these differences are fairly small, and there is much overlap in behaviour between boys and girls. Sex differences in abilities (verbal, visual, spatial, and mathematical) are even smaller now than they were in the early 1970s (Hyde & Linn, 1988). However, there are clear (and increasing) gender differences in academic performance in the UK. For example, findings contained in a 2005 report indicated that girls outperformed boys at A level in 74% of state schools, a difference that probably reflects gender differences in motivation.As Shaffer (1993) pointed out, there are some differences that were not identified by Maccoby and Jacklin (1974). First, girls show more emotional sensitivity (e.g., they respond more attentively to babies). Second, girls are less vulnerable developmentally than boys and are less likely to suffer from learning disabilities, various language disorders, or hyperactivity. Third, boys tend to be more physically active than girls.In a large-scale survey of gender stereotypes in 30 different national cultures, Williams and Best (1982) found that there were many similarities across the various cultures. Men were seen as more dominant, aggressive, and autonomous; a more instr