Differences in Young Children's Expectations of Women's and Men's Intervention in Aggression

Abstract

This paper reports two experiments which examined children's expectations of women's and men's intervention in aggression. In Exp. 1, 91 preschool children were randomly divided into 2 groups and shown separate video tapes: (1) subjects viewed a man passively watching young children's simulated fighting and (2) subjects viewed a woman passively watching identical simulated fighting. Upon questioning, 17% of subjects in the male-adult condition reported adult intervention while 4% of subjects in the female-adult condition reported intervention. In Exp. 2, 30 preschool boys were randomly divided into 3 groups and subjects viewed a tape of either (1) an adult male passively watching simulated fighting, (2) an adult female interrupting simullated fighting, or (3) irrelevant material (control). Tapes were discussed and rerun with subjects to ensure comprehension, then subjects were observed in free play during which the adult they had viewed was present but behaved passively. Aggressive acts were recorded for the four quarters of each play period. Aggression was uniformly low throughout the adult-male condition, high throughout the control condition, and progressed from low to high over the course of the adult-female condition. These studies appear to support the existence of differential expectations and suggest that such expectations influence behavior but may be overridden or altered under certain conditions.