Some say men are from Mars and women from Venus – and when it comes to assessing their own abilities, men really do seem to be living on another planet.
New research has revealed that men are more likely to be ‘armchair experts’ than women.
Experts from the University of Waikato in New Zealand found that men were more likely than women to think they could land a plane after watching a YouTube video.
Some say men are from Mars and women from Venus – and when it comes to assessing their own abilities, men really do seem to be living on another planet. New research has revealed that men are more likely to be ‘armchair experts’ than women (stock image)
Some 582 subjects were divided into groups, with half shown a three minute, 44 second clip of a pilot making a sudden descent.
But the clip was purposefully made to be ‘useless’ – as you could not even see the aircraft controls – so it gave no extra insight into how to fly a plane.
Nevertheless, men rated their confidence 12.24 points higher out of 100 at landing the plane than women after both sexes had watched the video.
Scientists from the University of Waikato in New Zealand published the study in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
‘Men tend to be more overconfident in their knowledge and abilities than women—even in a high-stakes environment, such as competitive running and diving,’ the researchers said.
‘This gender overconfidence gap is most prevalent when people are asked to evaluate their performance on a masculine-gender-typed task.
‘By contrast, women do not show the same overconfidence for feminine-gender-typed tasks.’
Despite men’s more obvious cockiness, both sexes were overconfident in landing the plane ‘without dying’ after watching the video.
The authors said having a visual representation could help the viewer better imagine they could really land the aircraft.
