Psychology Research

Psychologists in America have documented an unusual form of egocentrism that affects us all. University students who were asked to judge how high an unencumbered women would be able to jump, made lower estimates when they had weights attached to their own ankles, compared with when they didn’t. Veronica Ramenzoni and colleagues interpreted their finding in terms of Gibson’s ecological theory of perception. This is the idea that our perception of the world is intimately affected by what we are capable of doing in it. The new finding suggests our assessment of how we can act in a given environment biases our judgement of how other people will be able to act too. Participants indicated their own and the woman’s maximum jump height by adjusting the height of a plastic cylinder suspended from a pulley. Half the participants made this estimate twice: once stood stationary with ankle weights on, and then again after walking for five minutes with the weights on. The participants’ second estimate was lower for both themselves and, importantly, for the woman (even though she wore no weights). “…observers apprehend the actions afforded themselves and another actor by the layout of environmental surfaces with regard to their own capacity to produce action,” the researchers said. In other words, the burden of the ankle weights led these participants to perceive the cylinder as higher – a bias that affected their estimate of their own jumping ability and also the woman’s. The other half of the participants served as a control group. They didn’t wear weights but they did do the walking. Their jump estimates, for themselves and the woman, were the same before and after the walking. _________________________________ Ramenzoni, V., Riley, M., Shockley, K., Davis, T. (2008). Carrying the height of the world on your ankles: Encumbering observers reduces estimates of how high an actor can jump. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology DOI: 10.1080/17470210802100073

In the past couple of weeks I have been researching gender differences in visuo-spatial abilities because I wanted to create a fun experiment for our research & methodology course. The idea came from a recent incident in which my (fairly new) car, perfectly still and parked on an wide entry road to a private car park was scratched by a runaway vehicle. With 14 years no claim discount from my insurance, you can imagine how annoyed i was when i discovered the damage on a sunday morning!

As the area were I live is usually quiet and frequented mainly by locals, for a few days I have been on the lookout to try to detect the useless driver who caused the damage. Even if I’m still looking, this was an opportunity to observe people manouvering their vehicles and struggle with parking in tight spaces. Furthermore, confirming an old italian say “Donna al volante, pericolo costante!” which best translates as “Women driving are a constant danger”, it was amusing to observe how difficult many female drivers were making what I considered fairly simple manouvres.

I know it is sexist and I know that I will attract criticisms, but let’s start with a short clip…

[myspace]http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=37889811[/myspace]

Now that you laughed about this extreme case, think about your friends and consider these two questions:

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After the lighter intro, let’s have a look at some of the published material to see what is the truth about gender difference in visuo-aptial abilities.

Informally, people believe that men and women think differently and have different abilities. These differences are exacerbated by books such as John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Deborah Tannen also published extensively to address apparent gender differences in interaction and communication between genders (i.e. You just don’t understand). Another popular book is Sex on the Brain by Deborah Blum and published in 1997 in which she is exploring the scientific evidence behind gender differences.The fact remains that differences in practical abilities such as map reading, navigation and orientation as well as driving are commonly featuring in popular culture, magazines and jokes.

Such interest in sex difference raises some interesting questions and folk-facts such as the above about women and driving which inspired this post.

Some differences have been substantiated in the literature in psychology and neuroscience. For example women are consistently showed to be better at performing tasks involving verbal abilities (Hyde & Linn, 1988, Kimura 2000, 2002), however the data regarding visuo-spatial abilities is more controversial and research provided contrasting results.