Children and parent’s looking preferences to gender-typed objects: Evidence from eye-tracking

Differences between children and parents’ implicit and explicit gender stereotypes were investigated in two experiments. For the first time, the visual world paradigm compared parents’ and 7-year-old children’s looking preferences towards masculine- and feminine-typed objects stereotypically associated with a story character’s gender. In Experiment 1, participants listened to sentences that included a verb that inferred intentional action with an object (e.g. ‘Lilly/Alexander will play with the toy”), and in Experiment 2 the verb was replaced with a neutral verb (e.g. ‘Lilly/Alexander will trip over the toy”). A questionnaire assessed participants’ explicit gender stereotype endorsement (and knowledge, Experiment 2) of children’s toys. Results revealed that parents and children displayed similar implicit, but different explicit, stereotypes to one another. In Experiment 1, both displayed looking preferences towards the masculine-typed object when the story character was male, and looking preferences toward the feminine-typed object when the character was female. No gender effects were found with a neutral verb in Experiment 2, reinforcing the impact of gender stereotypes on implicit processing, and showing that the effects are not simply driven by gender stereotypic name-object associations. In the explicit measure, parents did not endorse the gender stereotypes related to toys, but appeared egalitarian, whilst children’s responses were gender-stereotypic.