Why men (yes, men) are better multitaskers

We should all be forgiven for believing that women are good at multitasking, and far superior to men. After all, that’s the popular image that has been in circulation for some time. In this depiction, a vibrant 30-something woman, still in her business suit after a demanding day at the office, is cooking a gourmet meal, balancing a toddler on her hip, all while talking on the phone, presumably raising money for a local charity. Popular books, like Why Men Can Only Do One Thing at a Time and Women Never Stop Talking, reinforce the idea that men are incapable of matching women’s cognitive balancing act.

The problem with this popular image is that there is not a shred of evidence to back it up. It may be true that working mothers must try to juggle a lot more than men do day-to-day, but there is no proof that they do it successfully. Indeed, nobody has rigorously examined the real question, which is: How skilled are we—men and women—at carrying out several mental tasks at once, without making a lot of mistakes?

Psychological scientist Timo Mantyla of Stockholm University decided to ask just that question in a couple laboratory experiments. Mantyla wanted to explore the idea that multitasking really comes down to two basic cognitive functions: One, the ability to remember and update goals, often called executive function. And two, the ability to reason spatially. Mantyla suspected that individual differences in these two skills alone would predict the most successful multitasking.

Why spatial reasoning? The importance of executive functioning seems apparent, but what does thinking about objects in space have to do with juggling cooking and a phone conversation? Well, think about timelines. Most goal-directed tasks—even something as simple as following a recipe for lasagna—involve thinking about time and steps and deadlines, and a common strategy for handling these complexities is to think about “time in space”—that is, a mental timeline.

Men are known to be better than women at many spatial tasks. So Mantyla hypothesized that individual differences in spatial ability—but not in executive functioning—would explain any gender differences in multitasking. That is, he proposed the heretical idea that men—not women—are superior at multitasking, as a direct result of superior spatial ability.

To test this, Mantyla recruited a group of volunteers, equally men and women, from 19- to 40-years-old, to complete a computerized multitasking challenge. They were required to monitor three digital counters, following these rules: Press the bar when the last two digits of counter number one read 11, 22, 33 and so forth. Press the bar when the last two digits of counter two show 20, 40, 60, and so forth. And press the bar when the last two digits of counter three read 25, 50, 75, and so forth. The counters were not visible all the time. The volunteers had to push a button whenever they wanted to monitor one of the three.

This is sort of like cooking a moderately complex meal—chopping and combining and simmering ingredients at different, precise times. No single task is hard, but coordination can be tricky. To make it even more like real life, Mantyla had the volunteers simultaneously perform what’s called a “name-back task”: They watched a long series of common names appear on the screen, one at a time for two seconds each, and they had to hit a bar when the one on the screen matched the one presented four names earlier. Think of this as trying to help a third grader with her homework while chopping and mixing and simmering dinner. The component tasks all put demands on working memory and attention.

Mantyla also gave all the volunteers a standard test of a particular kind of executive control. The idea was to see if individual differences in this cognitive ability predicted multitasking success. And they did. Those who were high on executive control were better multitaskers, making fewer errors overall. What’s more, male volunteers outperformed female volunteers on multitasking, making significantly fewer mistakes on the counter tasks. To keep with the analogy, they were about 10 percent less likely to burn dinner while helping with homework.

These results suggest that individual differences in executive control play an important part in complex task coordination. But the results do not fully explain the men’s edge in multitasking, since men and women were essentially equal in executive control ability. Something else must be at work, and contributing to men’s greater accuracy in multitasking.

That’s where spatial ability comes in. In a second experiment, Mantyla directly tested his timeline hypothesis. This time around, in addition to a test of executive control, the volunteers took a mental rotation test, to assess their spatial reasoning ability. Then they all once again completed the multitasking challenge.

Mantyla added one additional twist, asking all the women in the study to record where they were in their menstrual cycle. Men are in general superior to women in spatial ability, but women also vary individually throughout their cycles—with gender differences the greatest during the luteal phase and almost insignificant the menstrual phase. Adding this information created another test of the timeline hypothesis.

The results, to be reported in a future issue of the journal Psychological Science, were clear. Once again, men were better than women at multitasking. Men were also much better at the mental rotation task; in fact, this cognitive gender difference fully explained the male superiority in multitasking. Individual differences in spatial ability contributed to multitasking performance regardless of gender, and in fact individual differences in both spatial ability and multitasking fluctuated through the women’s menstrual cycle. That is, men were far superior multitaskers when women were in their luteal phase—but this gender difference pretty much disappeared when women entered their menstrual phase.

So it’s complicated. But certainly these findings should undermine the widely held popular notion of women as skilled—and superior—multitaskers. Perhaps the most important lesson here is to remain skeptical of the popular wisdom until it’s put to a rigorous test.

Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought, is about irrational decision making. Excerpts from his two blogs—“We’re Only Human” and “Full Frontal Psychology”—appear regularly in Scientific American Mind and The Huffington Post.

Comments

NICELY SET UP TESTS. EXCEPT FOR ONE THING – CONSEQUENCES OF AN ERROR IN THE REAL LIFE EXAMPLE VS. JUST FAILING TO RECORD A NUMBER COMPARED TO HAVING TO RE-DO DINNER, OR MIS-DIRECTING THE 3RD GRADER. JUST WONDER IF OR HOW THAT WOULD AFFECT PERFORMANCES.

Interesting article, but I would like to add one other important lesson: that a rigorous (scientific) test is still just a scientific test and need not answer the IRL question in hand. In this case I would say that men, in popular notion at least, are good at concentrating on one task. It is true that this task may be to multitask, but while being tested they really try to do the best they can. What the test does not tell is what the women were doing/thinking at the same time as they were doing the test. Maybe they were thinking of other things they were to do later the same day, like phoning friends, picking up children, what to have for dinner etc. This is one possible “flaw” with the design, there may be others. My point being that just because something is scientifically prooved, it does not have to be “the truth”. Always think critically about these things. Also, there is often at least a grain of truth in popular notion, even if individual differences always is king in my world 🙂

Well designed and executed elimination of familiarity with task and environment from the test. Results: multi-tasking is used by humans for more than kitchen work while helping children learn and grow. The notion that an historically male social role, like hunting, is a single task, is narrow and very wrong indeed.

Three years later and I only find “to be reported in a future…” – did the peer review find significant errors or was it all just a bunch of BS to start with?

If we look at this study regarding spatial differences:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21876159

We find that a patrilineal society women do SUBSTANTIALLY worse in spatial tasks than in a matrilineal society. In fact, in a matrilineal society, men and women both seem to have similar (as in not statistically significant).

The fact that Mantyla included spatial seems to me, playing devils advocate, that he wanted to queer the results. He knew that spatial differences would drive women’s scores down and men’s scores up.

Is this cheating?

Yes.

The article I referenced was published in 2011 and is a pretty big sample (1300 participants) as opposed to the 160 that Mantyla had. So either Mantyla did not perform due diligence or was looking for a way to get the result he desired.

My feeling is that these tests were flawed in that they had no reasonable goal other than what the designer of the test saw as a goal. The article I referenced required puzzle solving – that is goal oriented. But watching for numbers is a mind-numbing task with no discernible goal other than a checkmark for the researcher.

At best, what Timo Mantyla ascertained is that men are better at mind numbing tasks than women. Tasks that require no more than simple pattern recognition. But this doesn’t even vaguely come close to planning and making a moderately complex meal. As someone who does this on a daily basis, the tasks are laughably off the mark.

In my humble opinion I find “Nurture affects gender differences in spatial abilities.” to be far more interesting and believable than Mantyla’s attempt to measure multitasking.

If they can, then why don’t they? Just lazy?


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