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.
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.
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 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”.
I mean, landmarks don’t make much sense to use on a 2D, birds eye view map
It could with businesses. Turn left past the McDonalds. Keep going until you pass the empty plot on your right, etc.
You do you bb
I navigate by not navigating and just accepting that the second I left the house I was already lost.
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-throwerMost men know where they are going, but most are hopeless in remembering to take the correct turnoff without their wife reminding them!
