Eye-tracking is very hard to analyse in a way that will pass muster for a lot of reviewed journals. This is for a number of reasons: what you look at isn’t necessarily connected to what you’re thinking about (and if it is, how do you prove it), but also stuff like disproving the null hypothesis around saccades vs fixations, data quality and various biases that eye-tracking invites (forget doing a double-blind, for instance). So it’s not generally used on its own for serious research. The Qualtrics heat map tool they used is designed specifically to overcome some of the more fundamental issues, and in the context of this study I’m glad they didn’t use eye-tracking.
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No. You know why women are often on the look out? because we’re often harassed on a daily basis, sometimes in quite terrifying ways. It has nothing to do with BS evolutionary biology. It’s because we rarely get a days peace. FFS.
Oh but see, women are ONLY driven by our biological imperative to have babies… didn’t you get the memo? /s
Yep. We are only breeding machines, after all, not human beings…
Which is still that we’re only the sum of our biology…
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I was being uncharacteristically generous; extending benefit of the doubt, despite the fact that I am highly doubtful it is actually merited here.
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Do you remember the title, by any chance? Or have a link? I’d love to watch that.
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Oh no, absolutely not. Lady brains aren’t built that way, the act of becoming a mother changes lady brains! Of course fatherhood doesn’t change men’s brains /s
The purpose of the study is to emphasize how public spaces need to be designed with women in mind. Maybe even radically including women in the process! That reactionary measures like emergency telephones or safety apps aren’t cutting the mustard.
It’s not just sexual assault. Sexual harassment is awful. Being pressured to converse or give a phone number. Mugging. Violence from past partners or stalkers. The list doesn’t end
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Genuine question: Why are some of the clicks recorded as red and others are nearly transparent blue? I see no indication in the instructions for the tool that clicks are associated with magnitudes.
The redder the dots, the more clicks in that area. The bluer the dots, the fewer clicks on that spot for that gender.
So the photos show women clicking mostly to the sides, areas that are badly lit, at obstacles to line of sight, etc. An expression of looking at the pictures from the perspective of where threats might be hiding or emerging. The men’s show larger number of clicks along the path or the terminus of the path. Showing they are looking mostly at where the path goes, not places where they could be ambushed or harassed.
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It’s me again. I agree with a lot of the positions here, including the higher likelihood of women being harassed; there are a lot of references to literature supporting this in the article as well. And I also appreciate the generally civil tone of the discussion.
I do wonder whether a portion of this look behavior has some hereditary component, not just learned, which might be a behavioral evolution not dissimilar to the physical eye position evolution noted (not intended insultingly) earlier. The article discusses a lot of research about fear levels vs. gender, and support for this in the questionnaire answered by the subjects of this study, but does not, as far as I can find, cleanly differentiate between experience-based look decisions and instinct-based look distinctions of this subtlety (setting aside things like an instinctive tendency to quickly look toward a bright flash or unusual noise).
Any resolution of this question is also clouded by a degree of ambiguity introduced by the test methodology, which entails the subject imagining a walk and mouse-clicking where they’d look - not a guaranteed match for their actual behavior if in that real-world, real-time situation.
The problem is not women’s eyes. The problem is not hereditary. The problem is men. We are trained, for our own survival, to look at the world this way. Some women are lucky and don’t have to engage in these thought processes every day. Most aren’t.
The. Problem. Is. Men.
And yes, I know it’s not all men. I married a sweet guy who’s an ally and feminist. He agrees. The. Problem. Is. Men.
This speculation about eyes and brains and hereditary instincts is insulting. Do you really think trans women see the world differently than cis women?
Wait. Nevermind. Do not answer that question
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And one more thing. It isn’t ambiguous or cloudy. Many women here have said either directly or indirectly that this study is expressing the way we walk through the world.
We’ve spoken. Please start listening
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Men and women aren’t different species. Yes, there is some sexual dimorphism, but everything anyone has ever actually checked says it is small compared to individual variation. So if you see something as distinct as the responses on these heat maps, trying to attribute it to biology is basically trying to ignore the obvious. Especially when you’ve been told what the obvious is.
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I’ll make it plain, since the point of the entirety of this discourse seems to have been missed:
How you personally feel does not impact the reality that women throughout the world have no choice but to endure.
The behavior displayed in the survey (no matter how flawed) is a learned mechanism that women from all walks of life have adopted as a matter of survival.
Women act as they do because the world we inhabit gives us no other recourse.
While it may not be your conscious intent to be insulting, that’s exactly how it comes across when you glibly dismiss all our input, and insist on continuing to pontificate esoterically, as if we had said nothing.
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I’d like to see this study replicated but with race taken into account as well. No doubt in my mind that women across the board will still focus peripherally, but I wonder if we have more peripheral clicks for non-white women and men compared to white women and men.
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I spend a lot of time looking at bushes to identify plant species, but I’ll happily take the birds.
Which isn’t to say I’m not also scanning my surroundings for people I need to worry about. Because I definitely do that, too.
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Trying to invent some biological “woman eye” rationale for the plain fact that women are in more danger when out in public that men are is really reaching. I am al about genetic, heritable, biological explanations where they are applicable, but to make that happen, you would have to find a culture where women are not constantly worried about harassment and assault when in public and run this test on them. If you find such a please, please let us in on it. I don’t think such a Shangri-La actually exists.
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I think different methodology as well as replication would be very interesting. Especially in different contexts. Sometimes researchers tell us stuff we already know, but the process always holds potential for new insight. And hopefully persuades people to action outside the lab.
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Have you considered the lobster?
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Thanks for the link to this very interesting paper!
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