Gender bias is a preference to one gender or another. We may not be conscious of being bias about gender but subconsciously you could be, and this applies to everyone. With psychologist it would be very difficult to not let your values and assumptions influence psychological knowledge especially in gender bias work. The three types of gender bias are Alpha bias and Beta bias and Andocentric bias. Alpha bias is when people exaggerate between the difference of males and females. Beta bias is exaggerating the similarities between males and females. Andocentric bias is that males are the power in society.
Kohlberg’s stages of moral development
Kohlberg did a study with 72 males aged 10-16 and gave them stories involving moral dilemmas and studied if there was any pattern in the ways that they made sense of the dilemmas. Kohlberg then distinguished three levels of moral reasoning. The preconventional level, the conventional level and the postconventional level. Kohlberg only did this on males and how males apply moral reasoning and Kohlberg being a male himself makes this very andocentric bias and beta bias.
Later on this theory was applied to females. They did the same moral dilemmas, and asked the exact same questions but females did not do as well as the males did. This also is andocentric bias everyone assumed that the moral test was aimed at both male and females which it wasn’t.
Gilligan critiques Kohlberg’s study
Gilligan did a study similar to Kohlberg’s but on female morality, she believed that there is a distinctive female and male view of morality. Gilligan did this study on 29 women aged 15-33 who all were attending counselling on to abort or not to abort an unwanted pregnancy. From this Gilligan suggested that women make moral decisions by a care orientation rather than the male’s moral decisions by the justice orientation.
The problem with Gilligan’s study is that she did a smaller group and different age group to Kohlberg’s, the moral dilemmas were very personal unlike Kohlberg’s which were all made up. Gilligan has been seen as maybe being alpha bias.
I think that if Kohlberg had interviewed females as well and saw the problem with his morality theory he could have been able to change it to work for both genders and still have it measure morality in the same way it would not be so gender bias. It may still be seen as alpha bias but I do not think that there is that much of difference in males and females morality it’s different in how we look at the situations.
Animals in research.
There a lot of pros and cons when it comes to using animals in research but none of them tip the scale to what everyone wants. The Major pro in animal research is how much it helps medical researchers find drugs and treatments to improve health and medicine. From animal testing many medical treatments have been made possible such as cancer and HIV drugs, insulin, antibiotics and vaccines etc. This is the main reason why people support animal testing. The major con in animal testing is the fact that so many animals are experimented on and then killed afterwards, or they are injured or damaged for the remainder of their lives. The main problem people have with animal testing is when the animals die for no reason, that there was no benefit to human kind from experimenting and killing that animal.
Harry Harlow’s Monkey Love Experiment.
Harlow did a series of experiments with rhesus monkeys on attachment. Harlow separated the monkeys from their mothers at birth, in replacement of a mother he gave them to artificial mothers one constructed with soft terry towelling material the other was constructed out bare wire mesh. Harlow would feed the monkeys from both mothers but found they only went to the wire mother for food and would find comfort from the soft mum. Harlow concluded that comfort and security rather than food formed the basis for early mother/infant attachment. How ever the monkeys that Harlow used for this could not socialize well in adult hood, they were either indifferent or abusive to the other monkeys and also had trouble mating and parenting.
The problem with Harlow’s experiment was that it ruined the monkey’s adult hoods and it affected their own kids because they didn’t know how to be a proper a parent or how to be around other monkeys. Harlow could have had the baby monkeys socialize with each other, sharing the same environments together, maybe that would have prevented the problems in adult hood. I do not think it was necessary to ruin monkey’s adult hoods to find that out.
I think animal testing should be aloud as long as the animals aren’t living in poor conditions and are be looked after to the best standard. If testing on animals can save thousands of lives or help medical researchers find a cure for some type of disease I believe it is worth it then. Yes they kill animals after doing a test on them but I see it as they are putting it out of pain because they know it would not be nice for that animal to keep living; they are doing the right thing by killing them. If the animals are not being treated right and are being put through unnecessary pain then no I would not agree with that but animal testing. It has proved to be such a helpful thing and to those who are against it no matter what, are they going to volunteer to be experimented on instead of the animals, are they willing to risk their lives to find out if this drug can cure cancer etc, no I don’t think they would so how else do they expect us to test things out and find out if they work, do they want researchers to use humans and kill thousands of them to see if something works or not.