“*In the Water Level Task the participant is shown a bottle partially filled with water and is told to notice the way the water fills the bottle. The participant is then asked to predict where the water will be when the bottle is tipped. Knowledge that the water remains horizontal is shown by about 85% of college men but only by 50-65% of college women, and this finding has been replicated many times across cultures and age-range (Wittig & Allen, 1984). *”
It’s hard for me to believe that anybody other than a small child could actually fail that test. Does this mean that half of the women out there don’t understand the concepts involved with pouring milk over their cereal?
I was actually at a talk where a woman at the University of Chicago who studied the differences between male and female brains was speaking. She gave the test mentioned above to the audience along with several others. She also cited the same stat as mentioned above so it would seem to be true.
However, this does NOT make women dumb. The speaker had given that test to women with multiple degrees and high measured IQ’s and they ‘failed’ it. Likewise, there are some simple tests that men fail and look pretty dumb that women excel at. It is simply a difference in how male and female minds are wired. This has nothing to do with smarts.
Simply put, males tend to have better spatial skills. The speaker speculated that this is a holdover from evolution. The males tended to roam looking for food and mates while the females tended to stay close to home and raise babies. As a result natural selection favored the male animals we once were who could stray far afield and then make it back to the den.
The whole talk was really cool. It was amazing to see how men and women are actually wired differently (for instance she studied men and women who had very similar physical brain damage from accidents [same area of the physical brain being damaged]…the resulting effects were very different between the sexes).
I should note that this is on average. There are certainly many exceptions to this…men who can’t find their own ass with both hands and women who can dead reckon themselves halfway around the world. This whole thing is merely broad strokes when looking at large groups.
I looked at this site and this is a terrible description of the trial. I don’t know what they really mean. They can’t possibly mean “Knowledge that the water remains horizontal.” Everybody knows that water remains horizontal when a vessel is tipped. I think maybe they were trying to get them to predict where the water level would be in the container after it’s tipped. Remember, 15% of the men didn’t understand it either. So it can’t be something so trivial that every child would pass it. You would probably have to contact Linn, M.C., & Peterson, A.C. (1985), although I wonder if they would remember 18 years after publication.
The site is talking about gender differences in cognition. I believe it’s been pretty well established that men are better at some things and women are better at some thing, in general.
If you’re interested in reading about how men and women think differently, I highly reccomend picking up a copy of “Sex on the Brain” by Deborah Blum (I think I spelled that correctly). She talks about how men and women are “wired” differently, and there’s some truly amazing research on the subject. They show how even newborn boys are girls react differently to stimuli. Very cool stuff:)
No, it means that for some, their understanding of that concept is not necessarily applicable to the concept of a drawn representation of a similar concept. That’s one limitation of the testing instrument I spotted right off. If the test had shown a photo of a half-full water bottle and photos of four different possiblities, I would be willing to bet that nearly 100% of persons of both sexes would pick the “right” outcome.
Some people’s brains just aren’t wired to interpret drawings the same way they interpret real life. If anything, I would say that this test was a better test of that than of spatial orientation or whatever they were trying to test for. Good spatial orientation testing that I’ve seen usually involves showing you an arbitrary arrangement of colored or patterened squares and asking what they would look like if they were rotated, mirror-flipped, etc.
Nope…they don’t. Just because it seems obvious to you doesn’t mean it is obvious to everyone. As I said, I saw this test performed in person on a room of people and the women performed worse on it than the men did. Surprised me too but the evidence was right there for all to see. The doctor speaking was also quite reputable and mentioned the stat cited in the OP (although I don’t recall the exact numbers to know if they were the same).
Again, there were other tests she gave the room of people where the men did measurably worse than the women (tests involving verbal skills sticks out in my mind).
I don’t know about KneadToKnow’s issues regarding a drawn representation of a tilted bottle versus a real tilted bottle is fair. If you had a real bottle with liquid in it and tilted it the liquid would remain horizontal for all to see and 100% would get the answer right. You have to use a drawing in this case.
It really is just a question of knowing that the water level remains horizontal. It’s referred to in the bibliography on the site cited by the OP as “Piaget’s water horizontality test.” Child development psychologist Piaget thought that children would normally “get” that the water level remained horizontal as the glass was tipped by about the age of 12.
Here’s a little more info - http://www.langston.com/Fun_People/1993/1993AFP.html
Personally, I’m really surprised that college age women would perform poorly in a test of basic spacial reasoning. I guess that maybe they didn’t cotton on to the real-life situation that was being represented. Still surprises me, though.
Now, Whack-a-Mole, I’m sure you didn’t mean that. Even I could fake a photo to make it look like the bottle was laying on its side with all the fluid resting quietly at the bottom.
Think Batman and Robin climbing up the side of a building.
By your reasoning it is unfair as well that men do worse in language skill tests than women. Instead of showing me a list of words and asking me to memorize them such as:
Car
Ball
Orange
Kite
Dog
You should actually show me a REAL car, ball, orange, kite and dog and then ask me to repeat what I saw (or a picture of those items). Bet I’d do as well as the women in that case too.
I think the whole point of the drawing is that you can take the abstract drawing and apply it to real world situations.
The University of Chicago doctor I saw give the lecture mentioned that her students at UoC regularly skewed her tests all out of whack. Basically the men and women did pretty much as well as their opposites in all tests. In short, they were all too damned intelligent to get fooled by much. She would only see the numbers mentioned in the OP pop out when the tests were given broadly over a wide range of the population (age, education level, etc.).
And we all know the real reason women aren’t good at spaitial relationships. All their adult life they’ve been told this: holds fingers 3 1/2 inches apart
is six inches long.
I remember reading about a water level test done with waiters and waitresses. Despite pouring water for a living, they performed worse than the general public. Why? The testers speculated that the waitpeople were so used to trying to prevent beverages from spilling that they naturally drew lines showing the water as being “past” parallel, representing their everpresent belief/ fear that the water was about to spill out. This would seem to support the idea that even direct, physical experience with a phenomenon may not help, but in fact even hinder, one’s ability to perform a similar skill in the abstract, on paper.
