Gender differences have always been a popular topic within
psychology, largely because it gives all of us something to root for and relate
to. I can’t tell you how many times I have disagreed with my brother when he remembers
an event one way and I remember something completely different, with little way
of knowing who is “right.” To date, many brilliant psychological scientists
have tried to describe the differences in the way men and women think. Often
enough, we find that we are not that different after all, while other times we
are different in the most unusual but obvious ways. To date, researchers have
focused largely on describing the ways in which men and women perform
differently in memory tasks. When it comes to events, women outperform men in
remembering the nitty, gritty details of experiences. However, fewer studies have
sought to describe why men and women differ in their ability to remember
events.
Memory is a fascinating but difficult ability to study within
psychology because there are so many steps involved. For example, in order to
remember the details of a party, you must first attend to them, then you must
see them, then you must commit them to memory, then you must be able to recall
them. All of these steps are necessary to show your memory is “working.” Thus,
these gender differences clue us in that men and women may have different
performances in the outcome, memory performance, while the reason for that
difference may be a female strength in one component of the process or a male
deficit in another.
So, Dr.
Qi Wang of Cornell University conducted a study to ask the question:
How do men and women differ in their
memories of events?
To address this question, Dr. Wang
recruited 60 males and female undergraduate students to participate in a study
on the everyday experiences of college students. After agreeing to participate
in the study and providing demographic information, participants received text
messages 3 times per day for one week. This text message simply said,
"What's going on?" After receiving this text, the participants were
to describe what they had been doing for the past 30 minutes, and rate their
current mood on a 7-point scale from "very unpleasant" to "very
pleasant." This method is called experience sampling, and attempts to get
more accurate information about the daily experiences of individuals than is
attained when completing standard retrospective questionnaires. At the end of
the 7 day period, participants were invited back to the lab to receive their
payment for participation. At this lab visit, the research staff administered a
"Surprise Memory Test," which probed each individual for information
about the events they reported throughout the week. The research team then
coded and compared the information provided throughout the week with the
content of information provided during the memory test. During this coding
process, the research team was interested in how consistent or inconsistent the
report was of each memory, as well as how socially-oriented the memories of
each event were. For example, memories of "watching a movie with a
friend" would be coded as social, while simply "watching a
movie" would not.
Throughout the week, they found no
differences between men and women in their reports of emotion at the time of
each experience sample, and no difference in the socially-oriented content of
the daily experiences recorded. However, women reported more detail in their
daily experiences than men. At the time of the memory test, women remembered
significantly more details in their experiences throughout the week. This was
true even when controlling for the total number of details the individual
reported on average. This was very interesting for me to learn, given that
there is a stereotype that women are more talkative, and thus the female
advantage in remembering events may be driven by increased opportunities to retrieve
and encode the information through conversation. However, the article does an
excellent job reviewing the literature in relation to this gender stereotype.
In fact, several studies have asked whether women actually do talk more than
men, and they have universally found that not to be the case. Instead, they
find that men communicate equally throughout the day compared with women, while
the quality, purpose, and audience of that communication are what actually
appear to vary by gender.
In the present study, Dr. Wang also found
that while men and women did not differ in how socially oriented their daily
experiences were throughout the week, this pattern changed over time. The
results of the memory test showed that men's memories for events during the
week became less socially oriented over time, while women's memories for events
became more socially oriented over time. This finding was interpreted by Dr.
Wang as an explanation for how gendered perceptions of experiences emerge, such
that the male identity is defined by agency and autonomy while the female
identity is defined by relatedness and care.
So what does this mean? Dr. Wang
interpreted these findings within a long history of research describing
superior memory performance among females regarding events, or episodic
memories, compared with males. Thus, these data suggest that women don't
actually retain more information over time than men, but rather they attend to
more details of the environment, encode more details of an experience, and then
show greater access to details of those memories in the future.
What does this mean? It’s important to keep in mind that this
study exclusively looked at memory for events, not any other memory. Males
outperform females in some other forms of memory, so in no way is this evidence
that women are smarter or more capable. Instead, this is a piece of evidence to
suggest that women may pay more attention to their environment than men and therefore
have the opportunity to create for to be remembered. For men, this means that
if you are tired of forgetting where you left your glass at the party, or which
chair is the broken one in the conference room at work, or where the bathrooms
are at the mall, then increasing your attention to your surroundings may really improve your quality of life (not to mention make your girlfriend happy).
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