An Experimental Study On College Students’ Implicit Sex Role Attitudes To The Roles Of Family, Work And Education

The transformation of sex roles in modern society is to have an impact on people’s sex role attitudes. In this research, we investigated college students’sex role attitudes from the respect of implicit social cognition by a Go/No-go Association Task. We used three sets of words which were strongly linked to the concepts of "family","work and "college education" to measure college students’identifications of their own gender roles and male or female roles. There were two experiments in the study. Experiment1examined the implicit associations between the three role concepts and the participants’self-concepts, in order to investigate male and female participants’ self-identifications of "family","work" and "college education". And Experiment2examined the implicit associations between the three role concepts and gender categories (male names versus female names), in order to investigate the participants’ attitude to the appropriate roles held by male or female. The results showed:(1)There was still a conventional attitude towards gender roles about "family". Women had a stronger self-identification with "family" than men, and they also had a stronger self-identification with "family" than with "work" and with "education". And "family" was stronger associated with "females" than with "males".(2) Men had a more conventional attitude towards female roles than women. Man associated "females" with "family" more strongly than women did, and they also associated "females" with "family" more strongly than with "work" and with "education".(3)The participants had an equal tendency to some degree about "work". Man and women identified themselves with "work" equally. And when they associated gender categories with the three role concepts, no difference was significant.(4)Given the family-work balance, there was still a conventional expectation to women.(5)The participants’ self-identifications with "college education" were different from their identifications with the role of the gender they belonged to. And men associated "males" with "education" more strongly than women did.