Confidence Boosts Women’s Spatial Skills

Generally people think females are slower and less accurate than men on a range of spatial tasks. This has been proved true by studies as well.

But there are many factors which can help boost spatial skills. University of Warwick researcher Zachary Este has recently concluded from a research that confident women are better at spatial tasks. 

He looked at women’s ability to perform a standard 3D mental rotation task, while at the same time manipulating their confidence levels.

 Estes says: “Prior research shows that women tend to do poorly on tasks that require spatial awareness,”  “That’s borne out in the common jokes we always hear about men being better at parking and map-reading than women. But we wanted to see why that was, so we manipulated people’s confidence in our experiments with spatial tasks, and it does seem that confidence is a key factor in how well women perform at this kind of task. Our research suggests that by making a woman feel better about herself, she’ll become better at spatial tasks—which in the real world means tasks such as parking the car or reading a map. So a little bit of confidence-boosting may go a long way when it comes to reversing the car into a tight parking spot.”

The researchers tested spatial ability through a series of four computer-based experiments on a total of 545 students at a university in the US.

Read the original study here.