Humans
PUBLISHED
A study conducted by a husband-and-wife team at Brunel University of London has called into question the prevalent myth that "only women are able to multitask." However, the pair did find one key difference between men and women that could be responsible for why that myth spread in the first place.
The design of the first experiment the researchers performed was fairly simple, asking participants to carry out up to five tasks simultaneously with the aim of replicating a real-life situation.
The participants were told the main task was to "cook" food following a specific recipe using pretend ingredients. They were told they would be scored based on their mistakes during the task and how far they made it through the recipe before time was up.
Their second task involved searching a phone book for numbers beginning with "01421," and the third and fourth involved finding letters, numbers, and words in a document and on a computer screen.
The fifth task was where things became a little more interesting. The team played a voice recording asking open-ended questions over a speaker at regular intervals, which participants were expected to respond to.
It was this final task, rather than any of the others, that separated the men and women in the experiment.
"When multitaskers had to coordinate five different tasks, male multitaskers ignored the Conversation Task more than twice as often as females, while performing comparably to females in all other tasks," the team wrote in their study.
So while men were just as capable at multitasking generally, that wasn't the case when it came to conversation.
That said, the team found that although men chose to ignore the conversational task more than women, when they did answer the questions, they did so with "comparable quality and speed" to the women.
A question of perception
In a second experiment, the team showed a second group of participants footage of the first group performing the task and asked them questions about their performance, multitasking, and how stressed out or in control the initial participants appeared.
While performance on all but the conversational tasks was comparable, the reviewers rated males to be more stressed than females, performing worse than females, and being less in control of the task.
There has always been this suspicion that sex differences do exist when it comes to multi-tasking. But until now, they had not been identified”
Andre J. Szameitat
"Importantly, these ratings were strongly influenced by the conversation task performance," the team writes.
"Therefore, this study not only showed a sex difference in multitasking performance but also that this difference impacts how multitaskers are perceived by others, providing a potential explanation for the development of a stereotype that women are better at multitasking than men."
According to the team, this reduced talkativeness could explain why males are likely to be perceived as worse at multi-tasking, even if they are just as good/bad as females.
“There has always been this suspicion that sex differences do exist when it comes to multi-tasking,” Andre J. Szameitat, Deputy Director of the Centre for Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience at Brunel University of London, said in a statement. “But until now, they had not been identified.”
“This reduced talkativeness amongst men could explain why males are likely to be rated as being worse at multi-tasking than women," he added.
In short, according to this smallish study, men and women are about as good as each other at most kinds of multitasking. But don't ask men about this when they're busy, they might not give you an answer.
The study is published in Psychological Research.
