Pointing to Food and Picking Pink

An article in The Economist (August 23, 2007) discusses some recent research in gender differences and the origins of those differences.

Joshua New , Max M. Krasnow, Danielle Truxaw, and Steven J.C. Gaulin conducted a field experiment to investigate whether men or women are better at finding food in a natural environment. They used a nearby farmer's market to test their hypotheses: women will remember the location of previously visited food resources better than will men, and the higher the nutritional value of the food, the better the location will be remembered.

A total of 96 volunteers (41 women and 45 men) each stopped at six of the 90 food stalls in the farmer's market. Later, they pointed (individually) at the six stalls from a location in the center of the market. Women were more accurate, by an average of 9 degrees. Both men and women were more accurate at pointing at the stalls that contained food with higher nutritional value.

These results were originally published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (the first scientific association, you will recall from chapter 12, p. 384).

Anya Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling asked British and Chinese young (early 20s) men and women to pick their favorite colors as they flashed on a computer screen. While most studies like theirs reveal a near universal preference for blue by both genders, they were able to find a preference for reddish to pinkish hues by women. Participants who scored as feminine on the Bem Sex Role Inventory, also showed a preference for reddish to pinkish hues, regardless of their sex. They did not discover any cultural differences.

These results were originally published in Current Biology. Here is a link to a summary of their article.

The article in The Economist links both of these findings to evolutionary psychology. Women being the gatherers in primitive human hunter-gatherer societies and women being the ones most likely to select edible fruits.