Condry and Condry Article Response
ARTICLE RESPONSE
1
Article Response to Condry and Condry (1976)
Julia Sneed
Condry and Condry (1976) set out to discover whether or not gender labels determined how an infant’s actions were perceived due to socially mediated gender roles. Previous researchers have found that if adults expected a child to behave a certain way, their actions could bring forth the very behavior they expected. This lead them to believe that this type of conditioning could be responsible for differences between the sexes that is often observed in child development as early as infancy. Condry and Condry realized that in all of these previous experiments and observations, the researchers knew the sex of the child. In order to see if these differences were truly observed or merely projected onto the children, Condry and Condry decided to see how much humans attribute behaviors to a child’s perceived gender. They hypothesized that subjects’ perceptions of an infant’s behavior will differ between participants who think the infant is male versus participants who think the infant is female.
Condry and Condry conducted an experiment in a classroomlike setting to test their hypothesis. They brought in male and female participants and both male and female experimenters were present at all times. They watch a video of an infant being presented with different emotion inducing stimuli, such as a teddy bear, a doll, a jackinthebox, and a buzzer, with approximately a minute of exposure to each of them. The tape is about ten minutes long.
Subjects were tested in classes of about 60 to 70 participants for each of the three sessions.
Participants were given a packet of instructions, rating scales, and demographic information scales. They were told that they were participating in an ongoing experiment to study the emotional development of the first two years of life. The questionnaire included rating scales
ARTICLE RESPONSE
2
pertaining to
1
Article Response to Condry and Condry (1976)
Julia Sneed
Condry and Condry (1976) set out to discover whether or not gender labels determined how an infant’s actions were perceived due to socially mediated gender roles. Previous researchers have found that if adults expected a child to behave a certain way, their actions could bring forth the very behavior they expected. This lead them to believe that this type of conditioning could be responsible for differences between the sexes that is often observed in child development as early as infancy. Condry and Condry realized that in all of these previous experiments and observations, the researchers knew the sex of the child. In order to see if these differences were truly observed or merely projected onto the children, Condry and Condry decided to see how much humans attribute behaviors to a child’s perceived gender. They hypothesized that subjects’ perceptions of an infant’s behavior will differ between participants who think the infant is male versus participants who think the infant is female.
Condry and Condry conducted an experiment in a classroomlike setting to test their hypothesis. They brought in male and female participants and both male and female experimenters were present at all times. They watch a video of an infant being presented with different emotion inducing stimuli, such as a teddy bear, a doll, a jackinthebox, and a buzzer, with approximately a minute of exposure to each of them. The tape is about ten minutes long.
Subjects were tested in classes of about 60 to 70 participants for each of the three sessions.
Participants were given a packet of instructions, rating scales, and demographic information scales. They were told that they were participating in an ongoing experiment to study the emotional development of the first two years of life. The questionnaire included rating scales
ARTICLE RESPONSE
2
pertaining to
References: Condry, John, & Condry, Sandra. Sex Differences: A Study of the Eye of the Beholder . Child Development, 1976, 47, 812819.