According to beahaviorism we are all born with a blank state of mind, tabula rasa (blank peace of paper), on which the enviromental influences will come and write on, forming this way our behaviore. In other word’s our behaviore is a result of learnt behavioural paterns which are enriched by expiriences we live through out our life. For the past handreds of years man has formed and lived in societies. Based on Skinner, social behaviur may be defiened as the behaviour of two or more people with respect for one onother or in concert with respect to a common enviroment.
And this social behaviour arises because one organism is important to an other as part of its enviroment, so it is only natural that most of our behaviour is influenced by the societeis we are brought up in and live in. One very important aspect in social life based on the learning theory is sex-typing. In other words and accordin to the learning perspective great emphasis should be given to both the rewards and punishments that children recieve for sex-appropriete and sex-inappropriate behaviour, always taking in to acount the learned sex-types of behaviour through observation towards the adult members of the sociaty.
Meaning the observable behaviour that distinguish specifc behaviural paterns and ideas between male and female. Unlike psychoanalitic theory, social learningtheory treats sex typed behaviour like a eny other learned behaviour. In other words no specific psychological principles or processes must be postulated to explain how children become sex typed. If there is nothing special about sex-typed behaviours, then sex typing itself is neither inevitable nor unmodifiable.
Chidren become sex typed becouse sex happens to be the basis on wich their culture chooses to base reward and panishment. Meaning that if the culture the child is brought up in is les sex based, in other words if the sociaty gives bases to a male femal differnces and supports ideas like the female is inferiour in relation to the man, then the child will develop the same sex typed behaviour. Evidence has been provided to suport this idea of the learning theory accounting for sex-typing.
Parents do differentientially reward and punish sex-appropriate and sex-inapropriate behaviours as well as serving as the childs first models for masculine and feminin behaviour. It has been shown that from infancy and on most parents behave differantly towards boys and differantly towards girls. They dress them differently and give them differant toys to play with. Also it was notised that the whole attitude towards boys was different than it was towards girls.
For examle they expected the boys to be more independed and take more dicissions by themselves and left them quit some time with out help even if help was asked for from the boy. Also observations made by psychologists in homes showed that parants rewarded their doughter if she danced or playd with dolls but critisized them when they ran, jumpt or climbed, in contrast to boys where such behaviour was suported and again if the boy playd whith dol in extreme casas was punished.
In this way we see that reacting differently to boys and girls parents may not only be imposing their own stereotypes on them but simply reacting to real innate differences between the behaviors of two sexes. For example, even as infants, boys demand more attention than girls do, and research suggests that human males are innately more psysicaly capeble than human femles. This could be why perhaps perants punish boys more easely and frequently than girls.