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Psychological androgyny and interpersonal behavior.

1978; American Psychological Association; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1037//0022-006x.46.1.40

1939-2117

Jerry S. Wiggins, Ana Holzmuller,

Media, Gender, and Advertising

Bern's measure of psychological androgyny was derived from only two relatively desirable dimensions of interpersonal behavior that may, or may not, implicate other less desirable traits that are sex role stereotyped. From an item pool of 1,710 trait-descriptive adjectives, sets of masculinity and scales were assembled that were comparable to scales and to those developed by Bern and by Heilbrun. The pool also contained items from eight scales that form an interpersonal circumplex. One hundred eighty-seven college men and women who rated themselves on the 1,710 adjectives were classified as stereotyped, near-stereotyped, or androgynous by Bern's criteria. Bern's measure of psychological androgyny appears to reflect a highly generalizable personological construct that implicates both desirable and undesirable dimensions of interpersonal behavior. Heilbrun's scales are both empirically and conceptually similar to Bern's, and both scale sets differ from traditional masculinity-femininity measures. There is a possibility that androgynous men are more flexible in their interpersonal behavior than androgynous women. Until very recently, the psychological construct of masculinity- femininity has been characterized by a conceptual fuzziness that has permitted unrelated and even contradictory attributes of persons to be viewed as indicants of a monolithic process. Constantinople's (1973) critical review of the major psychological tests of masculinity-f emininity, developed during the last 40 years, cleared the air for new approaches to an old problem. Bern's (1974) work on the construct of psychological androgyny is one such new approach. Her formulations place a unique emphasis on certain classes of interpersonal behavior that are generally considered more