Children's and parents' looking preferences to gender-typed objects: Evidence from eye tracking

Differences between children's and parents' implicit and explicit gender stereotypes were investigated in two experiments. For the first time, the visual world paradigm compared parents' and 7-8-year-old children's looking preferences toward 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 stereotypes, but different explicit stereotypes, to one another. In Experiment 1, both children and parents displayed looking preferences toward 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 rather appeared to be egalitarian, whereas children's responses were gender stereotypic.