Psychosemantic Approach to Studying Gender Role Attitudes

Abstract

This article concerns studies devoted to the analysis of stereotypes of women's behavior using a method of plural identification. This method has developed within the general psychosemantic approach and allows to study not only well realized social and mental representations, but those deep and implicit, too. The article describes three experiments. All of them are cross-cultural. In the first and the second experiments attitudes of Russian and Azerbaijan respondents were compared. The third experiment is focused on comparing the feedback received from Russian and US samples. It has been shown that cultural influence is more important than gender influence when we deal with attitudes towards female behavior and life scenarios. That means that positions of men and women of the same culture have more in common than responses pf women or men from different cultures. The method permits to conduct cross-cultural researches into different (subcultures both in one country or in different countries.