is performed more often by one gender than the other (Bandura & Bussey,
2004; Bussey & Bandura, 1999). Children may recognize that men, but rarelywomen, work on mechanical things. When an appliance needs fixing, father
takes care of it. All the garage mechanics seem to be men, and if someone on
television uses a screwdriver or a wrench, it is almost always a male. The chil-
dren are likely to conclude that men are rewarded for mechanical behavior but
women are not. Thus boys are likely to get involved with mechanical things,
anticipating rewards, whereas girls seek out other activities. At this point, oper-ant conditioning may also come into play, such as when a father rewards his
son for showing an interest in cars and laughing when his daughter asks to
help with an oil change.
Masculinity –Femininity
After a lifetime of socialization through operant conditioning and observa-tional learning, we should not be surprised that most adult men and womenact in gender-appropriate ways. But even casual observation of the people
you meet in the next few hours will confirm that there are large individual
differences in the extent to which people act in a masculine or feminine man-
ner. Although men are generally more aggressive and independent than
women, there are many exceptions. Similarly, finding women who do not fit
the stereotypic affectionate, emotional, and sensitive pattern is not difficult.
As with other individual differences, personality psychologists are inter-
ested in identifying, measuring, and describing the way people typically act interms of their gender-role behavior. Unfortunately, researchers do not alwaysagree on what to call these traits. Originally, psychologists used the terms
masculinity and femininity . People who act in ways that fit the traditional role
expectations for men were classified as masculine, and those who acted like the
traditional role expectations for women were feminine. Other psychologists ar-
gue that we should replace these terms with more specific and less emotionally
loaded labels. In particular, many researchers prefer the terms agency andcom-
munion (Helgeson, 1994; Spence, 1993). Agency refers to independence, asser-
tiveness, and control and is roughly similar to masculinity. Communion refers
to attachment, cooperation, and interpersonal connection and is similar to fem-ininity. Nonetheless, because many researchers continue to rely on the mascu-
linity and femininity labels, we will also use these terms here.
Early scales developed to measure individual differences in gender-role
behavior were based on two assumptions. First, masculinity and femininitywere assumed to represent two extreme positions on a continuum. As shown
in Figure 14.1, masculinity and femininity were considered opposites. The
Masculine Feminine
FIGURE 14.1 Traditional Masculinity –Femininity Model378 CHAPTER 14 The Behavioral/Social Learning Approach