How Psychology Affects Gender Roles

In this paper we will be exploring Learning Psychology and how it affects our societal gender roles. We will be looking at how our brain is trained to associate certain objects to certain gender stereotypes, and then we will be looking at why we follow societal stereotypes in the first place. First we will look at neutral stimulus. Neutral stimulus is something that causes no response until an individual is conditioned to respond to it. In todays society we are conditioned to associate flowers with beauty and women. Without conditioning, when you looked at a flower you would just think it’s a flower. However, if you were told that someone was wearing a flower in their hair, you would automatically assume their gender was female. This is because we have been conditioned to associate flowers with women since we see pictures of women and flowers in make-up and magazines, and flower smelling fragrances for women to smell "feminine". Therefore, our brains have been conditioned to associate a flower with stereotypical ideas of being female. …show more content…
A conditioned stimulus is a stimulus that previously caused no response, but through conditioning, now causes an individual to respond to it. Therefore, when an individual sees a flower they will automatically think of a woman. Another example would be body hair. When you think of body hair, you typically imagine it on a man. Even though women have body hair, like men, women are required to shave it off in order to fit society 's female stereotypes. Therefore body hair is a conditioned stimulus for us to think of men. By assimilating a neutral stimulus to a conditioned stimulus, we begin to form gender stereotypes. We associate body hair with men and sweet fragrances with woman both, which are unrelated unless they are