The transmission of gender stereotypes through televised patterns of nonverbal bias.

Abstract

One tacit assumption in social psychology is that people learn gender stereotypes from their environments. Yet, little research has examined how such learning might occur: What are the features of social environments that shape people's gender stereotypes? We propose that nonverbal patterns communicate intersubjective gender norms (i.e., what behaviors people value in women and girls vs. men and boys). Furthermore, we propose that children develop intersubjective gender norms in part because they are commonly and consistently exposed to these nonverbal patterns. Across three studies, we tested the hypotheses that (a) children are frequently exposed to a nonverbal pattern of gender-role bias in which people respond more positively to gender-stereotypical than counterstereotypical girls and boys and (b) emotionally perceptive girls extract meaning from this pattern about what behaviors others value in girls (traditionally feminine behavior) and boys (traditionally masculine behavior). Study 1 indicated that characters across 12 popular U.S. children's TV programs exhibited a small, but consistent nonverbal bias favoring gender-stereotypical TV characters. In Study 2, girls (N = 68; 6-10 years) felt more pressure to be feminine after viewing TV clips that included traditional nonverbal bias than after viewing clips that reversed this bias. As predicted, these results held only to the extent that children could accurately decode nonverbal emotion (i.e., were emotionally perceptive). Study 3 replicated these results (N = 91; 6-11 years). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).