Young Children’s Beliefs About the Relationship Between Gender and Aggressive Behavior Jessica W. Giles Vanderbilt University Gail D. Heyman University of California at San Diego Young children’s beliefs about the relationship between gender and aggression were examined across 3 studies (N 5 121). In Study 1, preschoolers (ages 3 to 5) described relational aggression as the most common form of aggression among girls and physical aggression as the most common form among boys. In Study 2, preschoolers and a comparison group of 7- to 8-year-olds were likely to infer that relationally aggressive characters are female and physically aggressive characters are male. Study 3 revealed that preschoolers show systematic memory distortions when recalling stories that conflict with these gender schemas. These findings suggest that even before children reach school age, they have organized patterns of beliefs about gender that affect the way they process social information. Researchers have long noted that gender is a central theme in early childhood. Gender information is highly salient in the lives of young children, driving not only their own behavior but also their notions of appropriate behavior for other children (Maccoby, 2002). There is a wealth of evidence that children’s toys, games, and clothing, as well as their patterns of social interaction, are differentiated along gender lines from an early age (see Maccoby, 1998, 2002; Ruble & Martin, 1998). For example, children’s ag- gressive behavior has often been found to be gender typed (see Coie & Dodge, 1998; Crick, 1996; Lagers- petz, Bjorkqvist, & Peltonen, 1988; Maccoby & Jack- lin, 1980). As early as preschool, boys are rated by their teachers as more likely than girls to engage in physically aggressive behavior, whereas girls are rated more likely than boys to engage in relationally aggressive acts, 1 such as excluding children from the peer group or threatening to revoke friendship (Crick, Casas, & Mosher, 1997). In addition, Zhang, Lingin, Zhang, Wang, and Chen (2003) have evi- dence that this pattern of gender differences can also be found using naturalistic observations of pre- school-age children. In attempting to explain the pervasive gender typing that exists in childhood, constructivist ap- proaches have emphasized children’s active role in constructing and defining their own social realities (e.g., Kohlberg, 1966; Martin & Halverson, 1981; see also Maccoby, 2002, regarding the role of same-gen- der peer groups in constructing gender). According to this perspective, children’s gender schemata, or their generalized cognitions about gender, play an important role in guiding behavior, in interpreting the behavior of others and in processing information relevant to gender (Bem, 1981; Martin, Ruble, & Szkrybalo, 2002). Consistent with arguments made from this perspective, several researchers have found that children often reinterpret social informa- tion in light of what they believe to be true about gender, even displaying memory distortions when situations are inconsistent with their gender con- ceptions (Liben & Signorella, 1993; Susskind, 2003). Of interest to the current research is the application of a constructivist framework to an examination of children’s reasoning about gender and aggression. Insights into such reasoning should extend research on young children’s gender schemas to a new sub- stantive domain and lead to a more nuanced un- derstanding of the development of children’s use of social category information to guide their inferences in the sociomoral domain (Crick, Bigbee, & Howes, 1996; Giles & Heyman, 2004; Heyman, 2001). r 2005 by the Society for Research in Child Development, Inc. All rights reserved. 0009-3920/2005/7601-0008 This research was supported by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Grant HD38529 to the second author. The authors wish to thank Brian Compton for assistance with computer programming, Cristine Legare for assistance with data collection, Caroline Gee for assistance with data coding, and Mary Mullane for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. The authors would especially like to thank the ad- ministrators, teachers, parents, and children at Urban Village, and Karen D. Love, Head Start, and Neighborhood House Associa- tion’s Head Start program. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jessica W. Giles, Department of Psychology and Human Devel- opment, Vanderbilt University, 230 Appleton Place, Peabody Box 512, Nashville, TN 37203. Electronic mail may be sent to jessica.w.giles@vanderbilt.edu. Child Development, January/February 2005, Volume 76, Number 1, Pages 107 – 121