Who Should Play the Instrument: The Effects of Pitch and Loudness on Children’s Gender Stereotyping of Musical Instruments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From a young age, children incorporate gender and gender stereotypes into their understanding of the world. From around 8.5 years old, children report that some musical instruments are “for boys” and others “for girls” (Abeles & Porter, 1978). Previous studies suggest that these judgments are largely influenced by past exposure to particular gender-instrument pairings (e.g., “My brother plays the trumpet, so trumpet is for boys”). In the present study, we investigated whether physical (size) and musical (pitch, volume) attributes affected children’s gendered judgments of musical instruments. To avoid potential influence from children’s past experiences, we used fictional instruments. Participants were 60 children (31 girls, 29 boys), aged 8.5 to 11 years old (M = 9.36, SD = 0.73) from across the United States and Canada. On each trial, children saw (large or small) and heard (high or low, loud or soft) a fictional instrument onscreen. Their task was to select which of two characters (girl or boy) should play the instrument. Main effects were found for instrument volume (p = .026) and pitch (p = .002), with children being more likely to select boys for louder instruments and lower-pitched instruments. In contrast, no effect of size was observed (p = .919). Results suggest that specific attributes of instruments impact children’s gender stereotyping and that beliefs about which gender should play which instruments do not come solely from past exposure to specific gender-instrument pairings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".