And here we thought stereotypes were based in myth!
Women and gay men are likely to be the worst drivers, a new study has shown.
Research has revealed that both perform poorly in tasks involving navigation and spatial awareness when compared to heterosexual men.
Psychologists at Queen Mary, University of London, who conducted the study, believe the findings mean driving in a strange environment would be more difficult for gay men and women than for straight male motorists.
Both tend to rely on local landmarks to get around, and are also slower to take in spatial information.
The computer-based tests were carried out on 140 volunteers, and demonstrated that gay men, straight women and lesbians navigated in a similar way, sharing the same weaknesses.
One of the tests “involved exploring radial arms projecting from a central junction to receive ‘rewards'”. Straight and gay men had similar results on that particular challenge, which proves another myth: get a gay guy drunk enough and he’ll explore his hetero side.
Travis Thomas
Unreliable study, and the sensationalist headline is meaningless. 140 people is a small sample. That they volunteered means the sample is nonrandom and quite possibly biased. The lack of actual statistics reported leaves me wondering. (I can’t find the article on Google Scholar.) Two virtual reality tests involving navigating “arms” and going swimming have nothing to do with driving a car, and the biases built into contrived VR experiments can’t be negligible, although I know little about cognitive psychology. The jump from one small sample test to “women and gay men are ‘worst’ drivers” is huge, and statistically unsound. I don’t believe it for a second. If they actually want to see who are worse drivers, they should take a larger sample and study, you know, people driving.
Puddy Katz
its so true, i can’t drive worth sh*t and my best friend just talks and talks while looking at whoever is in the other seat, looks out the the window at cute guys, adjusts his clothes, etc. etc. when driving. I am really lucky to be alive today!