“Maccoby and Jacklin (1974) proposed that once people learn gender stereotypes, they are more likely to attend to and remember events that are consistent with these beliefs than events that would disconfirm them. Carol Martin and Charles Halverson (1981) agree, arguing that gender stereotypes are well-ingrained schemes or naïve theories that people use to organize and represent experience. Once established, these gender schemes should have at least two important effects on a child’s (or an adult’s) cognitive processes: (1) an organizational effect on memory, such that information consistent with the scheme will be easier to remember than counterstereotypic events, and (2) a distortion effect, such that counterstereotypic information will tend to be remembered as much more consistent with one’s gender scheme than the information really is. For example, it should be easier for people to remember that they saw a girl at the stove cooking (gender-consistent information) than a boy doing the same (gender-inconsistent information). And if people were to witness the latter event, they might distort what they had seen to make it more consistent with their stereotypes—perhaps by remembering the actor as a girl rather than a boy or by reconstructing the boy’s activities as fixing the stove rather than cooking.
Martin and Halverson (1983) tested their hypotheses in an interesting study with 5- and 6-year-olds. During the first session, each child was shown 16 pictures, half of which depicted a child performing gender-consistent activities (for example, a boy playing with a truck) and half showing children displaying gender-inconsistent behaviours (for example, a girl chopping wood). One week later, children’s memory for what they had seen was assessed.
The results of this experiment were indeed interesting. Children easily recalled the sex of the actor for scene in which actors had performed gender-consistent activities. But when the actor’s behaviour was gender inconsistent, these youngsters often distorted the scene by saying that the actor’s sex was consistent with the activity they recalled (for example, they were likely to say that it had been a boy rather than a girl who had chopped wood). As predicted, children’s confidence about the sex of the actors was greater for gender-consistent scenes than for gender-inconsistent ones, suggesting that counterstereotypic information is harder to remember. But it was interesting to note that when children actually distorted a gender-inconsistent scene, they were just as confident about the actor’s sex (which they recalled incorrectly) as they were for the gender-consistent scenes in which they correctly recalled the actor’s sex. So it seems that children are likely to distort counterstereotypic information to be more consistent with their stereotypes and that these memory distortions are as ‘real’ to them as stereotypical information that has not been distorted.
Why then, do inaccurate gender stereotypes persist? Because we find disconfirming evidence harder to recall, and, in fact, often distort that information in ways that will confirm our initial (and inaccurate) beliefs.”
Source: Developmental Psychology Childhood and Adolescence 3rd ed. Author: SHAFFER