Poster #109 - Gender Identity Beyond Categories: How do Feminine and Masculine Identification Relate to 5-year-olds’ Prosocial Behavior?

• In Event: Poster Session 17

Abstract

Contemporary understanding of gender emphasizes the importance of considering more than two gender categories in order to capture the nuance of not only identity, but also the roles and traits that are associated with gender. Here we examine whether prosocial behavior is associated with 5-year-old’s identification with girls and with boys. We also examined the role of parents’ socialization of prosocial behavior as a potential mechanism for gender differences.

Fifty-two five-year-olds participated in tasks concerning gender identity and prosocial behavior. Parents provided children’s binary sex at birth (54% girls) and completed the Prosocial Behavior Questionnaire to assess socialization of helping and sharing (Gross et al., 2015).

Children rated their own gender identity using two continuous scales to indicate how much they identify with girls and with boys. Two scores (0 to 10) were calculated based on how close to the target gender group (indicated by a large circle) children placed themselves (indicated by a small circle).

For emotional helping, the experimenter pretended to hurt her foot by banging it into the table leg. She first said “ouch”, then after five seconds, looked at the child and said “I hit my foot, ouch”. Children’s behavior over 10 seconds was coded for whether they offered help and whether they showed empathic emotion (from 0 = no emotion to 6 = strong emotion).

For sharing (Hellmer, et al. 2021), the experimenter showed a bag with 10 marbles inside saying that the child could take them home. Then she pretended to realize they were her last marbles so the next child would not receive any. She told the participating child that they can choose to leave some marbles for the next child and turned away so that she did not see the child’s decision. The task was coded for how many marbles the child shared.

There were no differences by binary sex for prosocial socialization, emotional helping, empathic emotions, or sharing (all p’s > .05). A significant interaction in a repeated measures ANOVA indicated the expected patterns for group-level differences in identification with girls and boys across binary sex (p < .001; see Figure).

To examine how prosocial behavior is associated with gender identity, linear regression models were created for each prosocial variable: emotional helping, empathic emotions, and sharing; with predictors of sex, gender identification, and prosocial socialization. Only anonymous sharing had significant effects (see Table): more sharing was associated with less identification with boys and less prosocial socialization.

First, allowing children to identify their gender using continuous scales provides a critical advancement in measuring identity that can lead to more reliable and nuanced results as well as more inclusive research practices. Further, these gender identity variables give important insight into gender-typed behavior. That is, while we did not see evidence for differences in prosocial behavior by child sex, we did see that identifying with boys was associated with less sharing. In addition, parental socialization was surprisingly negatively related to sharing behavior, suggesting that parents might compensate low prosocial tendencies with increased socialization efforts.

Authors

• Christine Fawcett, Stockholm University
  Presenting Author

• Kahl Hellmer, Uppsala universitet