Jan 30 2008

Language aptitude, multitasking, abstract reasoning

Published by Dougal at 12:03 am under Bad Science, Language, Society

I’m curious whether these memes have any basis in reality:

  • Men have better visual/spatial reasoning than women.
  • Women have better language skills than men.
  • Men have better abstract reasoning skills than women.
  • Women are better at multitasking than men.

I’ve googled lots but come up empty. Well, lots of people convinced of the truth of these statements but no-one with so much as a reference to follow up.

The women/language one is the only one I know a little about, in that the Daily Mail seems extraordinarily keen on repeating the pop-science myths which The Female Brain described — women talk more than men, etc.

Some information on the origins and veracity of these claims would be really interesting.

One response so far

One Response to “Language aptitude, multitasking, abstract reasoning”

  1. # Louiseon 31 Jan 2009 at 7:01 pm

    I agree with you about these statements in that they are taken for granted as truth, if one tabloid paper prints them. Unfortunately things like this are concerned “common knowledge” but I do recall coming across some interesting research on sex differences but unfortunately it was a long time ago and I don’t remember. From what I remember a lot of these statements have small percentage differences, example men 51% woman 49%. Also in sex difference research I remember reading that confidence has a lot to do with performance and men tend to have better confidence rating. Also, societal expectations and gender roles do play an important role in what men and woman become interested in or expected to excel in.

    There is some interesting research in evolutionary psychology regarding multi-tasking, concentration and language skills, but again this is only conjecture. Finding solid information is difficult and a lot of the conclusions are not generalisable, for instance just because some research may support women to have slightly better language skills does not mean that men don’t or cannot equal or better the score. Regarding language skills, I remember it is related to language centres in the brain so that might be worth trying to look up.