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Men may never ask for directions when they are lost, but a new study claims that they are better navigators than women are when it comes to directions.
That’s right. The stereotype is true. But it has little to do with reasons that were previously believed.
“Sex differences in behavior or performance can arise from biological or cultural processes that have little to do with evolution,” the researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign wrote in their paper published in The Royal Society.
Researchers previously believed evolution was a big reason why men were better at directions because historically men would often travel farther from home than women.
Now, after studying 21 different species, including humans, scientists believe that because society often encourages boys to play outside more than girls, it forces them to develop their navigational skills at a younger age.
“Males outscore females in a statistically significant way in many spatial tasks, to varying degrees, with a small to moderate meta-analytic effect size in tasks directly related to navigation,” the researchers stated.
They looked at how far each gender traveled from their base primarily through observation, radio-tracking, or trapping.
The researchers followed the species’ habits for varying amounts of time, with some looked at for less than a year while others were measured for more than a year, to compare how species navigated ‘with and without a pronounced breeding season.’
They gathered data from humans using virtual or real-world mazes, by measuring how long it took to navigate through new environments to a specific location, or by measuring how well participants’ could point to an out of sight location.
“It is pretty obvious to me that the human sex difference is a result of culture, and not evolution,” Justin Rhodes, a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and co-author of the study, told Dailymail.com.
Rhodes added that more research was needed to determine on how brain function is molded to make men superior at navigation.
“The fact that the trait in humans comes down to how you are raised, answers the question of how women can overcome this gap,” he said, adding, “It is just a matter of experience.”