So one thing I’ve always wondered about it why men have the reputation of having superior visual-spatial skills. I think women who have tried to move anything (or watched men move something) might disagree.
I brought my old couch up here five or six years with the help of the previous owner. It was a real bitch, not the least of which was due to the fact that the guy selling it kept trying to sort of ram it through the openings.
“No, it needs to be turned on the side here,” I’d say.
“It’ll be fine.”
“No, it’s not going through.” And so on.
Same thing yesterday. I have an entire wall of shelving, and the guy who was removing my old couch insisted it had to come down before the old couch would go out.
I told him firmly that the shelves were there when it came in, and they would stay up when it went out. He finally got it out.
What are your thoughts?
Same experience here when you talk about those sorts of shape tasks. (I think cognitive psych calls that conservation of volume??, or something like that.) There’s a whole raft of different ones, like being able to look at a picture of a series of gears and know which way the last one will turn. That last, if I remember right, is the kind men are supposed to be good at.
But most of that research is pretty much BS. The within-group differences are way larger than the between-group differences, and the between-group differences are within a few percentage points of each other. The biggest issue is they don’t control for experience. As in, how many girls have fixed bicycles (which would help a lot in the classical gear problem) versus how many boys?
My thoughts? Women are horrible with directions. North, South, East and West. Like when driving from point A to never been there before point B. “Why don’t you just ask someone for directions?” Riiiight……and open myself up for a carjacking. What that has to do with their spatial relationship skills is a very weighty question. But it has an obvious link to common sense.
not all women are bad with directions, it’s a people thing not a gender thing. i can give any man a run for the money when it comes to directions. My son and husband, however, can’t find their way out of a paper bag. So stop with your sexist bs.