1y ago

Slight male navigational advantage likely due to cultural differences, researchers find

A team of psychologists, social scientists, philosophers and evolutionary researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in the U.S. has found evidence suggesting that the slight advantage males have in navigation ability is likely due to differences in the ways male and female children are raised.

In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the group describes how they studied navigational skills in multiple species to find out if there might be an evolutionary basis for one gender or the other having better skills.

37 comments

I swear almost everything in gender differences comes down to how people are raised. Parents gender train kids and that shit sticks.
- That is scientifically untrue. Male and female have very different biology, this is why diseases have different distribution, and drugs different effects. Biological differences are the vast majority, and can be easily studied statistically
  There are also cultural differences. But saying that most or all differences are cultural is pretty dangerous.
  Edit. Corrected wrong edit
  
  Ill be that guy. The comment before yours was mostly referring to gender whereas yours refers more to sex. Two separate concepts. I’d agree with both of you that the sexes are different physically, but our gender stuff is mostly just meme perceptions and not descriptive of reality.
  This claim about men’s natural sense of direction is an old myth but it’s important because it affects our ideas of gender being unequal (not sex).
  
  To clarify, the comment I replied was modified. It initially mentioned that almost all male/female differences are cultural. It was modified to refer to gender. I'll leave my comment unedited because of the discussion below.
  See how your comments have little pencil icons in the top-right and mine does not?
  You also glossed over the words "almost everything" which initially I thought were unnecessary for obvious reasons, but thought I better add just in case some idiot comes along and starts hurdy-during.
  Frankly, I'm inpressed. I didn't anticipate someone to be so full of shit, clearly. You win purely on brazen effort. I don't know what the prize is, but I don't want it.
  
  Your comment is mostly wrong. There are differences in biology, but it comes down to Y chromosome basically. Most differences are cultural.
  Cultural differences lead to huge differences in the observable statistics. That's the mistake you make in your comment: observable statistics can't make the difference between a cultural or biological origin for anything. Because behaviour (and this culture) will immensely affect the biology. Like doing sport or washing your hands or diet or whatever.
- Not physical strength and size. That's straight up hormonal differences. Ask any female bodybuilder, building muscle is more than twice as hard.
  
  Yes, but in the lingo of the 2020s, that is not a gender difference. It is a sex difference. Yes, I know this was not always the case. I've read old dictionaries, but at the moment, that's the usage.
  
  There's still plenty of overlap between the bell curves for average people, and anyway, how much does that difference matter? We share 50% DNA with bananas and the like .0000001% (someone else can do the math) difference between sexes results in social conditioning like your message here. Why?
Such an advantage, theories suggest, came about due to males having to move around in large tracts of land while hunting, while women stayed closer to home as they foraged.
This is a popular misconception but there's a lot of evidence that shows early human societies were egalitarian and men and women equally participated in hunting and gathering. Especially after tools like the ahtlotl (a spear-throwing device) became common place.
Here's an article from NPR about gender equality in early humans: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/07/01/1184749528/men-are-hunters-women-are-gatherers-that-was-the-assumption-a-new-study-upends-i
And here's a wikipedia article about the ahtlotl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower
- The NPR article says the opposite of the headline.
  By contrast, the new study found that in a third of societies for which there is data, the women hunt large game. In other words, they do go after the kind of big mammals associated with the stereotype of male hunters.
  Yes, women hunted sometimes, but in 40 of the 60 societies they looked at, women didn't participate in big game hunting at all. In the remaining third, they did find at least one female hunter, but they don't say what the ratio is.
- No. Women were/are more vauable to society because they can give birth. Males are expendable and encouraged to participate in risky activities. You see it to this day where women are almost always excused from being drafted into the military.
Am I dreaming? I thought this whole thing was settled as science from more than one study quite some time ago.
Males tend to navigate by direction and distance, and females tend to navigate by landmarks (subject to to variation of the individual, everyone is different and we're all special, etc etc etc). Each gender is more capable at their style of navigation than the other is; women can navigate better in certain environments because they're genuinely better at recognizing and remembering landmarks. Men's navigation is better in unfamiliar environments, but has no built-in error correction until you arrive or not at the destination, which is why men "never admit they're lost" in stereotype, because their gender-preferred style of navigation doesn't include the concept of "lost." They could be way off their course and never realize it, whereas women will "feel lost" if they don't recognize the place they're in or feel that there's a solid plan for what landmarks are coming next and etc.
There are physiological differences too; males have more iron in some part of their head and it's theorized that that's used to give them a certain weak sense of compass directions through magnetism.
Right? Did I just make all this up? I genuinely thought this was verified through scientific studies as of like a long time ago. Maybe I hallucinated it all, or maybe the whole thing was judged as impossible because men and women have to be the same, and got flushed into some kind of memory hole.
- I was part of a small study in the army that attempted to teach us land nav using our preferred "style" (no idea if the study got published). They gave us a test to determine if we learned directions better through landmarks or directions. Overwhelmingly it was landmarks. The US army is also largely made up of men.
  I know this is all anecdotal but when lost in the woods most men and women that I know default to landmarks. Older generations of men who were in the military were probably taught to navigate mostly via directions (i.e. compass directions) which may be where the preference/stereotype came from in past generations.
  
  Were the directions shit tho?
  I use distance and direction, but I'm from the desert where that's all there is, there are no landmarks. I've developed my natural compass from just knowing the sun on the sky.
  
  There was a study some time ago that determined that it is more common for men to build mental 3D maps of their surroundings. Women navigate more commonly like bees by landmarks, direction and distances.
  Mental 3D maps are better, but excessive. Affinity for men to do this is probably due to hunting and warfare.
  Edit: Unable to find a link.
- I swear every time science comes along and tells me this is what men do be, I’m always the opposite.
  I navigate entirely by landmarks (Well Google Maps these days).
  
  I navigate by not navigating and just accepting that the second I left the house I was already lost.
  
  I nonbinarily roll my eyes. Maybe the cartographile in me just keeps me in the right direction lol
  
  You do you bb
  
  I believe street names are part of the "male method", so Google Maps uses that method.
  If it said "Turn right at the intersection with the big police station", then it'd be the "landmark method".
- It sounds like you might have too much iron in your head.
  
  I eat a whole cereal bowl full of machine screws every now and then. Could that be the reason?
Most men know where they are going, but most are hopeless in remembering to take the correct turnoff without their wife reminding them!

37 comments