Study finds men have societal advantage for navigation

Lifestyle

By Katherine Donlevy

It turns out some stereotypes actually are true — at least according to one study.

When it comes to navigating, men really are better than women at finding their way — but it has nothing to do with a biological advantage, a new study found.

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found that the strength of an individual’s wayfinding ability simply comes down to the way they were raised.

Society encourages boys to play outside more frequently than girls, allowing them to develop their navigational skills from a young age.

“Sex differences in behaviour or performance can arise from biological or cultural processes that have little to do with evolution,” the researchers wrote in the paper, published Wednesday in The Royal Society.

The study compared the wayfinding abilities of males and females across 21 vastly different species — including otters, frogs, horses and, of course, humans.

The humans in the trial were tested through either virtual reality, or by navigating their way through a real-world city with either only a map in hand or with verbal instructions.

While females tended to travel farther from their homes, they ran into much more problems than their male counterparts.

“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 study states.

The results were consistent across the team’s large sample size of humans, who came from different economic brackets, cultures, races and more.

The conclusion flies in the face of previous misconceptions that men had evolved to a stronger sense of spatial awareness.

Researchers had previously assumed that men’s navigational strength grew from their ancestral history as hunters, whereas women stayed closer to the home as gatherers.

The notion was disproved by a smaller study done by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers in 2013, but did not answer why there was a difference in spatial awareness between genders.

“We believe that future research on human sex differences in navigation should focus on the role of socialization and culture, rather than evolutionary genetic factors,” the researchers said.