The Role Of Sexism In Cognitive Psychology

Sexism, like racism, is the stereotyping and often discrimination of a person based on their predisposed, usually unchangeable, biological characteristics. In the case of sexism, it is the selectively unjustified negative behavior against women or men due to their gender. From a psychological point of view, sexism could come from a cognitive, social and individual difference, or developmental perspective. When sexism is approached from the cognitive perspective, you must look into memory, perception, and the development, prejudice and stereotypes in order to understand what influence the mind has on sexism. From the social and individual difference perspective, personality is the largest factor in understanding sexism, but parental and peer

In order to explain the role that cognitive psychology has on sexism you must look into the creation of schemas, and thus the development of stereotypes and prejudice. Each person has a schema about each gender, which tells them the defining characteristics of a man or woman. A schema is a generalization about categories that help organize things like events, objects and people (Bernstein, 2014). Our schemas about people provide our perceptions of them, and allow us to fill in any missing information about people based on what we think is correct (Bernstein, 2014). Information is filled in about a person based on the generalized schema that you have of them whether it is correct or not. This paves the way to the creation stereotypes, a set idea about a person made on an assumption that they share the same traits of those in the same category, such as gender or race (Bernstein,

In order to consider ethics, you look at what is thought of as morally right or wrong. Through the definition of sexism, it is the discrimination of someone based on their gender, an unchangeable, and not chosen biological characteristic. It cannot be ethical to reduce a person to their biological characteristics, and therefore by their gender stereotype. To label a person based on their gender expecting the stereotypical man or woman, without considering their more important and defining characteristics is not ethical. A person should be looked as a whole instead of the piece they are assigned from society gender roles. This notion of projecting pigeonholed beliefs onto another person therefore makes the idea of sexism morally wrong. If the true morality of sexism was a universal notion, it is a possibility that sexism would become less common, and at least those with sexist beliefs would not openly act upon them. Sexism has a lot to do with personal beliefs and morals. These vary widely among people, and through cultures. Many people have strong sexist beliefs and many others strongly oppose those beliefs, because there is such a mix it creates finding a solution difficult, and it fuels the maintenance of the issue. As long as one person continues to hold sexist beliefs the problem cannot be extinguished as their belief can easily be passes though generations and culture. Beliefs are often passed though