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Perry And Bussey 's Theory Of Sex Essay

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Perry and Bussey’s (1979) study was motivated as a rebuttal to Maccoby and Jacklin’s (1974) claim that research and studies done up until then failed to give significant support to the theory that sex differentials based on same-sex model imitation as a mechanism for sex-role development was unimportant. Perry and Bussey contended this notion on two fronts. They repute current design models used to test imitation of same-sex models, stating that children are oftentimes given a single stranger as a role model, male or female, who preform mundane tasks and are then tested for imitation of the model’s response (Perry and Bussey, 1979, p.1700). This is nowhere near reminiscent of real life scenarios in which a child has multiple examples of both same- and opposite- sex models to compare and contrast sex appropriate social and cultural responses. They also re-examined how children code sex-typing displays into long-term memory by looking at how children respond to models they found themselves to be similar to. To that end, Perry and Bussey set up two related experiments that where designed to determine a) how might a child’s endorsement of an item be influenced by the frequencies with which same- versus opposite- sex models display similar preferences and b) does the child imitate said same-sex model more often when they believe the model’s behavior is appropriate due to a clear indication that the model is behaving typically for his or her sex. In the first experiment Perry

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