Why you should always tell a
woman her parking is perfect... if you want her skills to improve
6 November 2011
For some men, keeping quiet while
their wife is on her 17th attempt at reversing into a parking spot would not
come naturally.
But research suggests that they
might be better advised to bite their tongue – as lack of confidence is a
factor in women’s tendency to struggle in tasks requiring spatial awareness.
Tests showed that women improved
in these activities when their self-belief was given a boost.
University of Warwick psychology
researcher Dr Zachary Estes, working with Dr Sydney Felker from the University
of Georgia Health Centre, looked at the ability of 545 U.S. students to perform
a standard 3D mental rotation task, while at the same time manipulating their
confidence levels.
Dr Estes, whose research paper is
published in the journal Archives Of Sexual Behaviour, said: ‘Prior research
shows that women tend to do poorly on tasks that require spatial awareness.
‘That’s borne out in the common
jokes we always hear about men being better at parking and map-reading than
women.
‘But we wanted to see why that
was so we manipulated people’s confidence in our experiments with spatial
tasks, and it does seem that confidence is a key factor in how well women
perform at this kind of task.’
He added: ‘Our research suggests
that by making a woman feel better about herself, she’ll become better at
spatial tasks – which in the real world means tasks such as parking the car or
reading a map.
'So a little bit of
confidence-boosting may go a long way when it comes to reversing the car into a
tight parking spot.’
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