<p>Okay, just to clear up some arguments here:</p>
<p>-Some correlation does not mean a perfect +/-1.00 correlation. There is some variation.
-Ditto for the skills of understanding maps in various ways. We’re not born with the ability to understand them at all without learning, so it follows that we can continue to improve our skills for some time.
-These studies don’t mean that you in particular have to be good or bad at reading maps in a certain way.</p>
<p>OK, just asking:what’s so hard about reading a map?</p>
<p>Without a compass or any idea where you are?</p>
<p>Just to reiterate: </p>
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<p>Are you dropped in the middle of nowhere, like another planet or the desert or something, or are you driving on a highway or a road with signs? A compass would do me no good, but everywhere I’ve ever driven, there’s a road sign or a mile marker or SOMETHING to tell me where I am. So of course you have to know where “here” is. But once you do, again, what’s so hard about reading a map?</p>
<p>Sorry, romani, I’m kind of crashing this thread. I guess anecdotes aren’t allowed, but my son and I got lost tonight when I took him out for dinner and was trying to return him to his campus. My husband and my daughter would have had no problem with this. I would have killed for a map.</p>
<p>I wasn’t responding to you… it was just a general statement. Of course anecdotes are allowed. Most of the posts in this thread (mine included) are anecdotes.</p>
<p>FWIW, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if my generation was worse than older generations with mapreading. We’ve had GPS most of our lives. Even 5 years ago when I was a freshmen, it was pretty rare to see anyone walking around campus with a physical map. Most people had their smartphones and followed the line from where you were to where your destination was.</p>
<p>You’ve never driven on logging roads or where the weather is so bad you can’t read signs?
Of course I drive off the beaten track where many roads aren’t on a basic map. But it’s when I am out in the woods that I really get turned around.</p>
<p>I’m a Jersey girl, so we don’t have logging roads. If the weather is so bad that I can’t read signs, how would a map help me? Are you saying that the problem with maps is that you don’t know where you are? So how do the guys know where they are on this snowy logging road? And romani, my son totally relies on GPS, which was comical tonight,because it didn’t work on the college campus. We used to call my daughter “Sacagawea” when she was little, because she could find any place after seeing it once. No map.</p>
<p>emeraldkity4, I thought that the idea was that men are better at reading maps than women. Being turned around with no point of reference ( or compass) is a totally different matter.</p>
<p>I don’t see anyone proposing an explanation why male and female brains should be innately the same, on average and distribution, in every measurable function.</p>
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Of course everyone’s brains are different. No one said otherwise. But that doesn’t mean there are no identical traits, or that there aren’t patterns where you can say, “the majority of men are x, while the majority of women are y.”
All human brains have frontal lobes. That’s something identical throughout human beings.
By the same logic, you can go on to see if there are things that are identical in all male brains or all female brains. Considering that the different genders have biological differences, it’s not an unthinkable proposition.
I don’t know about the specific study in question, but I don’t think that the idea of biological gender differences is unreasonable.</p>
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Some of us are just hopeless with maps. 
Come to think of it though, I’m not good at remembering conversation either.</p>
<p>I’m actually being serious. Other than being lost in a blizzard on a logging road or in outer space, what is the actual problem with maps? To those that have difficulty, what do you experience? Is it simply knowing where “here” is? As I said, my husband and my daughter are WAY better at finding their way around. I’m not even disputing the study. I just really like a good map.</p>
<p>I just remembered a study I read about while studying Psychology 101 30 years ago. During the test, an image of a person’s face would flash on a screen. The test subject would have to describe the emotion shown by the image based on the facial expression.</p>
<p>Bottom line, the best men were not as good as the worst women - no overlap of the genders at all. I don’t remember if the discussion led us to believe it was cultural or hard-wired, but the result was not surprising.</p>
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I don’t know how to explain it… Maps are just confusing to me. Finding where “here” is can be a bit difficult at first. But I think it mostly has to do with the orientation of the map. If according to the map, I need to go “up,” where do I actually need to go? It’s just hard for me to get my head around it.</p>
<p>Thanks, stressedouttt. I’m not sure I understand completely, but I get the idea.</p>
<p>I agree with razorsharp. There is no reasonable argument why such physiologically different groups as human males and females should be essentially identical in the mean and variance in innate mental function.</p>
<p>Nobody’s saying that they are essentially identical; what we’re disputing is the idea that they are different in the ways that these researchers and other people throughout history have stereotyped them to be - which hey, just so happens to conveniently map in such a way that devalues the things women’s brains are “hardwired” for while more highly rewarding the things that men’s brains are “hardwired” for.</p>
<p>BUT as romani pointed out, the problem with null hypothesis testing is that we know that there’s a difference…not how big the difference is. They didn’t release the effect sizes. Are these differences big enough to be meaningful? Are they arbitrary? If you did the same test between Math Olympiad women and the top English tester women, would you get the same results?</p>
<p>We also don’t know from where the differences have come. Adolescence could mean that they come during the time when secondary sex characteristics manifest themselves and are influenced by hormonal development, or it could mean that they’re influenced by sociological indoctrination during childhood. Most likely (and like pretty much every other part of human behavior and cognition), it’s a mixture of both.</p>
<p>I also want to bring up that although the scientific results may be plain evidence, the interpretation is not. The scientists found that men have more intra-hemisphere connections while women have more cross-hemisphere connections, but they then go on to make all kinds of strange comments and interpretations based upon that.</p>
<p>Example:</p>
<p>“Intuition is thinking without thinking. It’s what people call gut feelings. Women tend to be better than men at these kinds of skill which are linked with being good mothers,” Professor Verma said.</p>
<p>Why use that example? Intuition in women has also been shown to be useful in certain business tasks - I remember reading a few studies a while back that said that women were better in certain business-related tasks like networking with others, avoiding and mediating conflict in the workplace, working on teams to solve problems, and trading on the stock market because of that intuition. Why be reductionist and refer to being a “good mother” in the article…and only that?</p>
<p>Also</p>
<p>Men tend to outperform women involving spatial tasks and motor skills - such as map reading - while women tend to better in memory tests, such as remembering words and faces, and social cognition tests, which try to measure empathy and “emotional intelligence”.</p>
<p>If a memory task is a memory task, why point out that the memory tasks are about “words and faces”? Do women do better on memory tests overall or only in memory tasks involving words and faces? Being a psychologist who studies social cognition myself, I would also like to point out that social cognition does not boil down to empathy and emotional intelligence. Social cognition is the idea that the way people think about social relationships is akin to the way that we think about other cognitively stored information. Again, this could mean that women are better at defusing potentially volatile situations (because they are quicker at “reading” people or accessing their memory about people’s attributes and triggers) or that they are less likely to fall prey to stereotypes (because they process them at faster rates, and are therefore able to recognize that they are falling prey to them faster then men and thus defuse them faster). But I rarely hear researchers describe them that way - usually, women’s better social cognitive skills are boiled down to empathy, love, nurturing, etc. To which I roll my eyes heavily. That’s not what social cognition means. At all.</p>
<p>I’m reminded of an archaeological study that happened quite some time ago - some scientists found the skeletal remains of two ancient Etruscans, a society that we know very little about. One held a spear while the other was buried next to the spear-bearer, so the scientists assumed that the spear-bearer was both a man and a great warrior prince, while the other figure was a woman and probably a lover or wife buried with him. Well, it recently came out through DNA tests that the spear-bearer was actually female, while the other figure was a male. Suddenly, the SAME archaeologists who just a few years ago speculated that this was a warrior prince ascribed different meanings to the spear - now they theorized that perhaps the spear was a symbol of the love and union between the woman and the man, and not her status in the community. In the years between the discovery we know nothing new about the Etruscans that would make them change their interpretation, other than that this skeleton is a woman.</p>
<p>My point is simply that the science itself stands on its own, but scientists ascribe interpretations and meanings to our findings that are colored by our own experiences and prejudices and biases. Because when I first read the article, my immediate thought was “Why would connectivity across hemispheres indicate better empathy and intuition?” If the left brain is logical thinking and the right brain is intuition, why would more connections <em>across</em> those two parts result in women being better at intuition ONLY (as opposed to tasks that involve both logic and intuition…like, oh I don’t know, interacting with people)? that doesn’t make any sense.</p>
<p>In fact, Penn themselves released a press release, and here’s how they worded the interpretation:</p>
<p>For instance, on average, men are more likely better at learning and performing a single task at hand, like cycling or navigating directions, whereas women have superior memory and social cognition skills, making them more equipped for multitasking and creating solutions that work for a group. They have a mentalistic approach, so to speak.</p>
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<p>qfe .</p>
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<p>This is really interesting to me. I am going to look for this now. Any anthropology student (undergrad even!) would be able to tell the difference between a female skeleton and male skeleton. Unless the pelvis was missing and they attributed wear patterns to “male” jobs. (ETA, I found it. The archaeologist is Alessandro Mandolesi.)</p>
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<p>They’re different, yes, but the differences are subtle, and individual differences among people of the same gender may be as great as the differences between genders.</p>
<p>I raised one of each gender – a boy who excelled in English and struggled a bit with math and a girl who excelled in math and struggled a bit with English. They were not exactly stereotypical members of their respective genders, but each of them was within the range of what you see in boys and girls.</p>
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Is this an example of why a woman is better at defusing the volatile situations? When a woman wants to get out of a relationship, she would say to the man that: If I were a third person who knows both you and me, I would advise you not to date me. Only a woman can think of such a way to end the relationship.</p>
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<p>Given that the average woman is smaller and physically weaker than the average man, we would have to be, wouldn’t we?</p>