A recent study seemed to demonstrate what men always believed about themselves – that they are better at reading maps and navigating than women are. While this is true, the reason why this is true is not really flattering to men. So if you're a man reading and went “I told you so”, don’t.
They even wrote a book called Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps to indicate that reading maps is a manly sort of skill; an innate ability that women simply do not possess.
It was via a computer game called Sea Hero Quest – which was actually an experiment – that researchers at the University College London came to their conclusions. They found that men were better at navigating than women. The game, with some 4 million players, had a pretty vast study sample; getting insight into users’ sense of direction and navigational ability.
So you think map reading is a man thing? Well, you're wrong. Turns out, it has more to do with gender and a lack of equal opportunities than with innate ability. When the researchers examined aspects such as equality relating to health, education, jobs and politics, they found that the gap between male and female ability is actually insignificant.
"So countries where there is high equality between men and women, the difference between men and women is very small on our spatial navigation test,” one of the researchers was quoted as saying. The gap is lower where gender equality is higher; which suggests a cultural impact upon cognitive ability.
The men and women of places such as Denmark, Finland and Norway were seen to have the best navigational skills in the world. Probably because of their Viking Blood? Perhaps all those centuries of sailing the seas; marauding and pillaging paid off?
Now the men in our lives may or may not be good with maps, but it the difficulty in asking for directions continues to plague men on road trips everywhere.Perhaps because men are (erroneously) convinced that they are just supposed to be the ordained map readers; are meant to have an unerring sense of direction, many of them will do anything rather than ask for directions.
It isn’t just women who say ‘left’ when they mean ‘right’. Men also assume this zoned out look when people speak in terms of specifics such as directions, distances etc.
Now that you know you're not supposed to be better at reading maps perhaps you will not let your manliness come in the way of asking for directions? From the paanwala, autowallah or your friendly Google baba?
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