Men really are armchair experts! Males are more likely to think they can land a plane after watching a YouTube video than women, study reveals
- Some 582 subjects were shown a 3m 44s clip of a pilot making a sudden descent
- The clip was made to be ‘useless’ and gave no 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
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.
Women are more likely to admit if the bill is wrong
In a recent study, researchers from Tel-Hai College in Israel set out to understand customers’ capacity for honesty in real-life situations.
A group of 278 participants were asked to eat alone at a restaurant in Tel Aviv and order two items from the menu, such as a coffee and a sandwich.
At the end of their meal, they were presented with their bill, but one of the two items they had eaten was missing.
The researchers found that the majority (169) of the participants failed to flag the error to their waiter.
However, a range of factors appeared to play in role in the decision of whether or not to raise the issue with the waiter.
Female customers were 16 per cent more likely to report the missing item than male customers.
And those customers whose more expensive item had been omitted reported the error twice as often.
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