City Research Online

Abstract

Contrary to the widespread stereotype that women are better at multitasking than men, no consistent sex differences in multitasking abilities between males and females have been found. We developed a novel multitasking paradigm consisting of five tasks designed to simulate real-life scenarios. In Study 1, 41 males and 37 females (the ‘multitaskers’) performed similarly in all tasks except a conversation task, which males ignored more than twice as often as females. To test whether this sex difference is noticeable to others, in Study 2 160 naïve observers watched videos of the multitaskers and rated their appearance. Females were rated as being more in control of the task, performing better, and being less stressed than males. Importantly, these ratings were strongly influenced by the conversation task performance. Therefore, this study not only showed a sex difference in multitasking performance but also that this difference impacts how multitaskers are perceived by others, providing a potential explanation for the development of a stereotype that women are better at multitasking than men.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Publisher Keywords:	Sex differences, Gender differences, Multitasking, Dual-task performance, Conversation behaviour, Talkativeness, Stereotype
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Departments:	School of Health & Medical Sciences School of Health & Medical Sciences > Department of Psychology & Neuroscience
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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