AP Psychology Unit 3: Gender and sexual orientation

What the exam asks

Section I (Multiple Choice): Expect scenario-based questions asking you to distinguish biological sex from socially constructed gender roles, identify how socialization agents shape gender schemas, or spot design flaws in correlational studies comparing groups by gender.
Section II (Free Response):
- In an Article Analysis Question (AAQ), you frequently must identify a non-experimental method (usually a correlational study; a survey is how data are collected, not a Part A method on its own) because researchers cannot randomly assign participants to a sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation, and evaluate sample generalizability using demographic tables.
- In an Evidence-Based Question (EBQ), you may use concepts like gender typing or social learning theory as outside psychological knowledge to explain how research evidence supports a claim about child development.

Core ideas

Sex, gender, and sexual orientation

Psychologists carefully separate biological characteristics from social, psychological, and romantic dimensions of identity.

Term	Definition	Key Characteristics
Sex	The biological status of an individual	Defined by anatomy, physiology, and hormones (including male, female, and intersex variations).
Gender	The socially and culturally constructed roles, behaviors, and attributes linked to sex	Varies across cultures and historical periods; learned and shaped through socialization.
Gender identity	A person’s deeply felt internal sense of being male, female, neither, or a blend	A core aspect of identity development that may match one’s sex assigned at birth or differ from it (e.g., transgender or nonbinary).
Sexual orientation	An enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, or sexual attraction to others	A distinct component of identity (e.g., heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual); independent of gender identity.

Socialization and learning gender roles

Socialization is the lifelong process through which individuals acquire the norms, values, and expectations of their culture. Gender roles are the specific cultural expectations for how people of a given gender should think, act, and feel. Children acquire these roles (gender typing) through several overlapping mechanisms:

Agents of socialization: Family members (through toy choices, chores, and verbal encouragement), peers (who praise gender-typical play and tease gender-atypical behavior), media, and cultural institutions model and reinforce expected behaviors.
Social learning theory: Children observe and imitate models of the same gender and receive reinforcement or punishment for their gender-related behaviors.
Gender schema theory: Combining social learning with cognition, this theory states that once children form a basic mental concept (schema) of gender, they actively organize their world—filtering clothes, toys, and careers—into “for my gender” and “not for my gender” categories, motivating them to conform to their own schema.

Gender and sexual orientation

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What the exam asks

Core ideas

Sex, gender, and sexual orientation

Socialization and learning gender roles