In the past few decades or so, multitasking has morphed from a novel psychological concept for workaholics into a demanding way of life for all of us. With our attention constantly divided among screens, social media platforms, and notifications, it’s even invaded our leisure time—and doubly so if you’re a parent who works from home.
That may be one reason that women, who still do most of the childcare, have long been credited with superior multitasking skills. But according to a new study in Psychological Research, men are just as good at multitasking (sort of).
To test their respective multitasking capabilities, London psychologists recruited 41 men and 37 women to perform a series of simultaneous tasks while their performance was monitored. The multitaskers were asked to complete a simulated cooking task in a kitchen setting (mixing ingredients in a bowl). When the kitchen timer beeped, they had to grab a list with phone numbers, find one, and write it down before completing an additional number and letter matching assignment.
Read more: “Are You a Self-Interrupter?”
While they rotated between these three duties, a slideshow on a monitor cycled through words, which the multitaskers also had to jot down on a list. To top things off, during the whole ordeal, a speaker would chime in every 20 seconds with conversational pre-recorded questions for them to answer like, “Would you rather always be 10 minutes late or always be 20 minutes early, and why?”
Sounds stressful, right?
After comparing the results, the researchers found both men and women performed the same on the tasks except for one: the conversation task. Although their answers were just as rapid and thoughtful, men ignored the questions more than twice as often as women. The researchers believe this may be because women communicate more in social contexts, but caution that they didn’t test this hypothesis.
During the second part of the study, the team showed videos of the multitasking sessions to a group of 160 people with no knowledge of the experiment and asked them to rate how they did. Despite performing as well on four of the five tasks, male multitaskers were rated as performing worse compared to female multitaskers. To the observers, men appeared less alert, less in control, and less happy, and poorer ratings were strongly correlated with worse performance in the conversation task.
In other words, men may be just as good at completing multiple tasks as women, but we can’t seem to communicate while we’re doing it. Unfortunately, that turns out to be a pretty important part of how we’re judged.
Use your words, men.
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Lead image: Genkomono / Adobe Stock
