Toys

Social cognitive factors in early sex-role development were studied by examining judgments of toy appropriateness for boys versus girls under both speeded and delayed response conditions, used as indices of automatic and reflective gender-schema processing, respectively. Subjects aged 3 to 7 viewed photographs of sex-typed and neutral toys and indicated either immediately or after a 2.8 sec. delay who usually plays with them. A toy choice task assessed the children's own sex-typed toy preferences. Flexibility judgments (number of neutral responses) increased in a linear fashion with age to neutral-toy stimuli. In contrast, flexibility with respect to sex-typed toys was generally low. The prediction that automatic-mode processing would be more strongly related to children's own sex-typing than is their reflective-mode processing was supported only for 3-year-old boys, in whom automatic-mode stereotyped judgments of feminine toys were linked to strength of sex-typed toy preferences.

To test the hypothesis that children know that certain toys are
appropriate for their own sex before they indicate preferences for
these toys, 128 boys and girls, aged two through five, were shown
pictures of masculine, faninine, and neutral toys. First, subjects
indicated their personal preferences (preference test). Second,
subjects indicated which itans were more appropriate for their sex
(stereotype test). There was no evidence for the hypothesis. In fact,
children--especially boys--displayed considerable sex-typed behavior in
their toy preferences at an earlier age than they expressed awareness
of which toys are appropriate for their own sex. This suggested that
early sex-typed preferences result from something other than children's
attempts to emulate same-sex stereotypes. A second hypothesis was that
boys would show greater rejection of cross-sex toys than girls. This
hypothesis also was rejected. Boys and girls showed equal rejection of
cross-sex toys, but boys more frequently chose same-sex toys than girls
did.