The effects of sex and sex-role typing behaviour on children’s problem-solving behaviour and outerdirectedness

Abstract

The effects of sex and sex-role typing behaviour on children’s problem solving ability and glancing behaviour (outerdirectedness) were investigated. Two hundred and fifty five subjects were tested in a series of six experiments. Experiment I was a pilot study involving adult student subjects whose glancing behaviour and problem solving skills were tested in three experimental tasks - the Rod and Frame Test, the object assembly tasks and the card game. In Experiments II and III, children were categorized into various sex roles by means of the Children’s Androgyny Scale (C.A.S.), and the effects of sex and sex role typing behaviour on their problem solving ability and glancing behaviour were studied using the RFT and object assembly tasks. In Experiments IV and V, the effects of sex and sex role typing behaviour were investigated under the more ‘social’ condition of the concept identification task. In Experiment VI, the learning strategies utilized by different types of subjects were investigated by means of the discrimination task. The findings from Experiment I revealed that adult student subjects, regardless of sex, engaged in very little glancing behaviour and its restricted range resulted in the non-significant difference in glancing behaviour between male and female subjects. As a result of this failure to demonstrate this important difference between the sexes, it was decided to abandon the use of adult subjects and to utilize children as subjects for the remainder of the research. The findings from Experiment II failed to demonstrate any effects of sex role typing behaviour on subject’s performance on the RFT. The introduction of external cues in the experimental procedure in Experiment III yielded results that partially supported the hypotheses that children’s problem solving ability and glancing behaviour can be differentially affected by their sex role typing behaviour. In Experiments IV and V, the subjects were tested with task problems that included ‘social’ cues, and the results supported the hypothesis that children’s problem solving ability can be differentially affected by their sex role typing behaviour by demonstrating both the adaptability of the androgynous subjects and the behavioural restriction of the sex typed subjects in their performance on the experimental tasks. No effect of sex role typing behaviour on subject’s glancing behaviour was demonstrated. The results also indicated that subjects of different sex and sex role orientation have different problem solving strategies. From the results, it appears that the female feminine subject’s task approach orientation was characterized by a cue learning (reliance on external cues) strategy while the male masculine subject’s task approach orientation was characterized by the problem learning (task oriented) strategy. The androgynous subject’s task approach orientation appeared to be more flexible, varying between cue learning and problem learning depending on the nature of the situation. Experiment VI was designed to investigate these different learning strategies utilized by different types of subjects, and the findings corroborate the findings from Experiments IV and V that female feminine subjects do indeed use a cue learning strategy in their problem solving. The performance of the androgynous subjects of both sexes indicated that they were able to use either strategy effectively. Overall, the results of the research supported the hypothesis that sex and sex role typing behaviour by children do result in differential problem solving skills, with androgynous subjects being better problem solvers than sex typed subjects at tasks designed specifically to elicit masculine or feminine responses. The findings were attributed to the differential socialization process for males and females. Implications of the findings were discussed.