sexual double standards.

            In the article I chose this week, researchers looked at the sexual double standard from a cognitive approach. Their theory was that when the double standard is researched by other methods they are planting a seed by only having participants focus on sexual behavior. According to this article, in the real world people pay less attention to sexual behavior and make judgments without knowing sexual behavior because they are able to judge on other factors regarding there lifestyle, and don't just judge them over sexual behaviors. The article states “Busy environments constrain the attentional resources available for processing social information making person evaluation more difficult.”

               The theory they later test is that when a study focuses on sexual behavior people will only pay attention to sexual behavior, but when other factors are involved it becomes much less important. They test this by putting participants into different situations, one where their attention is divided among other things, and one where their attention is only on sexual behavior. They created several vignettes making sure no mention of gender and sexual activity was made. Participants only knew that they were evaluating people in these vignettes. The researcher found that when attention is divided genders were rated equally as far as sexual activity, but when all attention is put on sexual activity women were rated more negatively than men were.
               This information is important because this suggests that perhaps the sexual double standard does not exist in the real world, but when tested to see if the double standard exists participants begin to notice it more often. The article calls it a cognitive short cut and that making judgments is a method of cognition that people use to better understand people quickly.
          One media example of this would be The Scarlet Letter. The main character in the novel is quickly judged because everyone is paying attention to her sexuality (this may be due to the large A on her clothing dubbing her an adulteress) while the man she had intercourse with was not judged because his sexuality was not widely known.

Marks, Michael J. "Evaluations of Sexually Active Men and Women Under Divided Attention: A Social Cognitive Approach to the Sexual Double Standard." Taylor and Francis Online. Psychology Press. Web. 15 Nov. 2011. <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01973530701866664#preview>.

Conformation Bias

Today I found an article all about conformation bias and how it affects the sexual double standard. This was an interesting perspective because it asks the question which came first. The article talks about how people treat the double standard differently when they were aware of the double standard. They will recognize instances in which the double standard existed. Conformation bias is the idea that people have a tendency to recall information that confirms an idea. Examples of this would be If An employer who thinks that an employer is highly intelligent may spend more time to only information that is consistent with the belief that the employer is very smart. An example that apply to the sexual double standard that they describe in this article would be when someone is aware of the double standard, they will recognize instances in which the double standard existed instead of instances where there was no double standard at all.
According to the article, people generally don't evaluate sexual activity in men and women differently, however (Marks, 19) at the same time 93% of women in one study said that they feel that women are judged more harshly than men. This is where conformation bias comes into play, The theory is that people fail to encode or undervalue information that goes against the sexual double standard. (Marks, 20) To test this theory, they created a one paragraph fictional journal entry telling of one persons sexual history. They were randomly assigned whether the person was a male or a female. They then had to rate how many positive and negative comments were made about the characters sexual behavior. This study showed that there was actually no interaction between gender, men were rated the same as women. (Marks, 22)

In the second study, participants were told to write out all the comments made about the characters sexual behavior, both positive or negative. Results showed that negative comments made about the female target more often. These results show that perhaps the double standard only exists because people perceive that it does exist. If we take into consideration the fact that more times than not, there is no double standard we may be one step closer to making this an invalid stereotype. (Marks, 22)

Below is a really good video that gives a better example of what conformation bias is, as well as a graph that can show exactly what the sexual double standard is. As you can see, men are praised for being sexually active while for women, it is the opposite.

Marks, Michael J. "Confirmation Bias and the Sexual Double Standard." Sex Roles Vol. 54(2006): 19-26. SpringerLink. Web. 1 Nov. 2011. <http://www.springerlink.com/content/f448v1hm5320m738/>.