Shockingly, Undeserved Praise Improves Men’s Navigation Skills
LatestScience, as it is wont to do sometimes, has landed like an innocent little butterfly on the shoulders of a pretty dismal finding: appealing to certain gender stereotypes can be just as confidence-boosting for men as it is confidence-sapping for women, even and especially when those stereotypes have no basis in truth. The mere thought that men are somehow better equipped to navigate the wilderness of America’s highway system, for example, was enough of a call-to-arms fantasy for men to step up and be better at not driving them and their womenfolk into a Texas Chainsaw Massacre trap.
Researchers at Durham University in England enlisted 40 male and 40 female undergraduate students to play a computer game (Mist, from the sound of it) that tested their navigation skills. Subjects were tasked with locating a hidden object using colorful three-dimensional shapes as landmarks or by assessing the geometry of a virtual room’s walls. Half of the participants were told, suggestively, that the results of their gaming experience would be used to evaluate gender differences in navigation skills.