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Finally, psychologists have discovered a type of face that men are better at identifying than women: the faces on Transformer toys.
It’s a first. All previous scientific studies have found that either women are better than men at identifying faces or there is no gender difference.
“One of the suggestions of this prior work is that that women are inherently better than men at recognizing faces,” said Isabel Gauthier, David K. Wilson Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University, who conducted the new study with graduate student Kaitlin Ryan. “But we believe that experience plays a major role in facial recognition so we tried to come up with some way to test our hypothesis regarding this gender difference.”
The approach they hit upon was testing people’s ability to identify the faces of the toys they played with as children. The researchers’ intuition was that men may have played more with Transformers then Barbies when they were younger, and vice versa for women, and they confirmed this by surveying people about their experience playing with these toys.
“So women had much more experience studying Barbie faces and men had much more experience studying Transformer faces. That difference in experience was just what we needed,” said Gauthier.
Read more here. (Vanderblit)
It’s a first. All previous scientific studies have found that either women are better than men at identifying faces or there is no gender difference.
“One of the suggestions of this prior work is that that women are inherently better than men at recognizing faces,” said Isabel Gauthier, David K. Wilson Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University, who conducted the new study with graduate student Kaitlin Ryan. “But we believe that experience plays a major role in facial recognition so we tried to come up with some way to test our hypothesis regarding this gender difference.”
The approach they hit upon was testing people’s ability to identify the faces of the toys they played with as children. The researchers’ intuition was that men may have played more with Transformers then Barbies when they were younger, and vice versa for women, and they confirmed this by surveying people about their experience playing with these toys.
“So women had much more experience studying Barbie faces and men had much more experience studying Transformer faces. That difference in experience was just what we needed,” said Gauthier.
Read more here. (Vanderblit)
