Why Men are Better at Directions Than Women: The Evolution of Navigation for Sex

Are men better at navigation than women? Apparently, they are. Not only that, but scientists have now found evidence that there's a reason for it. Men apparently evolved better navigation ability because men with better spatial skills could roam further and have children with more mates.

"It's the first time anybody has tried to draw a line between spatial ability, navigation, range size and reproductive success," said Layne Vashro, the first author of the study, in a news release. "Most of this chain has been assumed in the scientific literature."

Spatial skills include being able to visualize spatial relationships and manipulate that image in your mind. For example, it involves visualizing how to fit a bunch of odd-shaped objects in your car as efficiently as possible.

"Among the most consistent sex differences found in the psychological literature are spatial ability and navigation ability, with men better at both," said Vashro. "In the anthropological literature, one of the most consistent behavioral differences between men and women is the distance they travel. This difference in traveling is assumed to explain the observed differences in spatial ability and navigation ability. Now, we've drawn a link between spatial ability and range size."

In this latest study, the scientists interviewed members of the Tw and Tjimba tribes, which live in a mountainous, semiarid desert area in Africa. They have dry season camps in the mountains, where they forage, and wet season camps near their gardens. During the year, they travel distances of about 120 miles, navigating on foot in a wide-open natural environment. In addition, they "have a comparatively open sexual culture," according to researchers.

The scientists had the participants in the study perform different tasks and looked for male-female differences and correlations among those differences. They tested volunteers' ability to rotate objects mentally in addition to other spatial perception and navigation tasks. In addition, the researchers measured the range size of Twe and Tjimba people.

In the end, the researchers found that men traveled farther than women and to more places than women. In addition, the men who did better on the mental rotation task traveled further both during their lifetime and the past year than other men.

"The question is why should men get better benefits from spatial ability than women?" asked Elizabeth Cashdan, one of the researchers. "One hypothesis, which our data support, is that males, more than females, benefit reproductively from getting more mates, and ranging farther is one way they do this."

The findings are published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.