Social Intelligence and Nonverbal Communication by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030349646
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Gender and Person Memory

Women tend to outperform men on a number of tasks relevant to the person-memory domain of social intelligence. Women show better memory for targets’ appearance, nonverbal cues, and verbal statements (about close others) than do men (Hall et al., 2006; Horgan et al., 2004, 2012, 2017). Women also tend to have better face-recognition ability, especially for female targets (Megreya, Bindemann, & Havard, 2011).

Theoretical explanations for gender differences in person memory run the gamut from distal to proximal factors. On the distal side, McGivern et al. (1998) proposed that, relative to men, it would have been adaptive for females to more thoroughly process their immediate surroundings; greater environmental awareness from them was needed for food-gathering and offspring-protection purposes throughout our species’ history. Environmental risks to females and their offspring would have included objects and people (viz., dangerous plants or people).

From this perspective, greater person memory among women would merely be a by-product of gender differences in environmental awareness. In a test of this theory, Horgan, McGrath, and Long (2009) had men and women sit in a room with a TV monitor showing a person they were told to pay attention to or not. A female confederate, who participants thought was a research assistant, also was in the room. The room contained objects as well, some of which could have been viewed as potentially dangerous. Women did not show better memory for the objects in their surroundings than men. Women had better memory for only the people in the environment (confederate; person shown in the TV). This was interpreted as evidence that women’s greater interpersonal orientation (i.e., relative to men) might better explain their enhanced person memory.

The perceived gender relevance of person-memory tasks (favoring female perceivers) as well as women’s tendency to be more interpersonally oriented than men are two proximal factors that might explain why women have better memory for their targets than do men. Horgan et al. (2004) found that women had better overall memory for the appearance of targets than men, both under directed- and incidental-learning conditions. Although the reason for this gender difference has proved elusive (Schmid Mast & Hall, 2006), it has been suggested that how people adorn themselves might be a more female-relevant domain of interest among perceivers (Horgan et al., 2017). In support of this, when perceivers’ memory for targets’ appearance was separated into two categories, namely their physical features (e.g., eye color) and dress (e.g., color of shirt), women’s advantage over men was restricted to the dress items (Horgan et al., 2017).

If women tend to be more interpersonally oriented than men, then information about other people might be more socially relevant to them, because such information could be used for relationship-building purposes. Plenty of evidence exists showing that, relative to men, women demonstrate better memory for social information (Cross & Madson, 1997). Unfortunately, in the domain of person-memory research, gender is often used as a proxy for differences in interpersonal orientation (Horgan et al., 2017). More important, in a study in

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