the Guardian
Tim Radford, science editor
Women are not more intuitive than men: they just think they are. A national internet experiment involving more than 15,000 people has confirmed that women are no better than men at spotting which smile is a fake, which sincere.
Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, challenged Britons to log on to a website, (www.sciencefestival.co.uk), study a series of partly masked photographs, and decide which smiles were from the heart, which ones calculated.
Asked before the challenge, 77% of women classified themselves as "highly intuitive". Only 58% of men made the same claim. But performance did not match self-perception. Men spotted 72% of the genuine smiles, women 71%.
Feminine intuition failed even more signally when it came to reading men's faces. Men, it turned out, could correctly detect 76% of the fake female smiles.
Women spotted only 67% of the dissembled smirks by the opposite sex.
"These findings question the notion that women really are more intuitive than men. Some previous research has found evidence for female intuition, but perhaps over time men have become more in touch with their intuitive side," Prof Wiseman said.
The participants found it hardest to unmask fake smiles when the mouth was covered.
(Source: The Guardian)
No comments:
Post a Comment