I’m not buying that heatmap data. Why are almost all the dots on the left red? That would mean that women pick a random spot and focus on that for an extended period of time before moving on to the next. This is not really how you’d investigate a scene. The right images are much more believable to me: Short glances at random points to get an overview of the scene and then re-investigating points of interest.
I am a man, though. Women: Do you really stare random points into oblivion?
Edit:
Ok, at first I thought this was actual eye tracking information. However,
[researches] asked [participants] to click on areas in the photo that caught their attention.
Then the different-colored dots make even less sense. And why are there fringes?
I recently watched a BobbyBrocolli video on it, the controversy mostly surrounded UofU, a quick search shows that Pons and Fleischman are from UofU. The video also mentioned that BYU also claimed to discover cold fusion, but not the energy of the future self sustaining kind.
This would be the perfect use case for that fancy Apple VR headset they released a year or two so. Since it has built-in eye tracking, it would be easy to set up a test in a controlled environment where participants navigate it while looking around.
Navigating that scene in real life (or even simulated) would make the data orders of magnitude more annoying to interpret. On a static image you can just overlay all eye movements and produce a heatmap. But for a subject that’s actually (or virtually) moving, none of the data would coincide and you’d have to manually find out which focus points were actually equal.
I feel like utilizing eye tracking would be used if they were to study this concept more deeply. That data would be more complicated to sift through given how much data and how many variables might come into play. Definitely more telling but also harder to analyze.
In the article they note that they participants were shown photos and told to click on areas that caught their attention. The results show that women paid more attention to the periphery. No eye tracking, no long focus.
As a woman, imagining situations like those: I can see the brightly lit center is empty, that's all I need to know about it. The stairs require several glances especially if I'm in heels or other unstable shoes. But those dark corners need checking and rechecking the whole time I'm walking, to be sure no tiny changes betray a lurker. Who is probably going to wait until they're at my back to make a move.
My mental image of the guys scanning the same image: "Yeah that's where I'm going, that's obviously where I'm looking." Sure, they could get mugged but it's less likely, and physical threat isn't on their mind.
This is completely untrue, men are (and always have been) the primary target of random violence such as mugging. According to FBI crime statistics it's hugely disproportional year after year. Women are disproportionately victimized by their intimate partners, both male and female. Both of these facts are beyond tragic but it is, in my opinion, really important to get these things straight. Women are more likely to scream for help when they are being robbed which leads them to being de-prioritized when violent criminals are choosing their targets. Men tend to submit, and are likely to avoid reporting it due to shame, so the disparity is probably significantly higher than the already gigantic reported disparity.
Hope you don't see this as me just trying to stir shit cause I'm not. It just really irks me to see that sentiment repeated even though it's entirely unsubstantiated. I'm a man of small stature and a minority. With awareness of the reality of the situation, the threat of physical violence is literally always on my mind. I've had a solid handful of random encounters in public that very nearly turned violent and it causes me pretty severe anxiety.
Don't know why I felt like typing a novel over this, like I said though I guess I just find it frustrating. I can't talk to my female friends about this, they just laugh at me. They talk about it like I'm wholly immune to violence by virtue of being male when it couldn't be further from the truth.
Edit with data from FBI crime data explorer:
Over the last 10 years it's 906k male victims of robbery to 474k female victims, and (though it doesn't need to be said) that's just about double.
My point wasn’t that women aren’t looking at the surroundings, but that they don’t do it as is portrayed in the image. You said it yourself: “checking and rechecking the whole time” That doesn’t match singular hotspots, but rather a more spread-out heatmap with peaks at certain positions.
I was mugged in the playground of my building, the street across fine my house, my lobby, and at 57th and suttton, all in Manhattan. Then a few more times when I lived in Baltimore. I really hope most women don't get raped that often.
I hope you've started scanning the dark periphery like we do. Not because you deserved anything that happened to you! And I'm not assuming you weren't already. But because I can't do anything to protect you from over here on the Internet and I don't want that to happen to you anymore. It's when we're near home that we tend to let our guard down.
Many of them likely aren't immediately useful to most people but here goes.
1 I got older, got a few degrees, got paid a bunch and have been living in areas with extremely low street crime. I could probably pass out in front of my house with a Benji sticking out of my fly and it would still be there in the morning.
2 I quit drinking. That wasn't an issue when I was a kid but later on it provided 2 huge benefits:
2.a) My situational awareness is never impaired.
2.b) It eliminated the vast majority of situations where someone might find me an interesting target.
3 I spent an absurd amount of time practicing and studying martial arts. The fighting parts of that aren't that useful but many RBSD (Reality Based Self Defense) classes are actually practical. tl;dr It's now fairly easy to find actual statistics on many forms of violence, look up the most likely ones for you, find the proven counters and practice those. For example, I've done a ton of drills that are a variation of shoving an attacker, yelling "Get away from me you PERVERT" (because while people tend to ignore cries for help, everyone wants to know who the pervert is), and running away.
4 Closely related to 3 is the general realization that you don't need to make yourself immune to violence. It's hard to be a good fighter and it's hard to make yourself the least attractive target. It's pretty easy to avoid being the most attractive target. For example, men are often targeted by men who want to exert dominance. Looking tough is counter productive because the attacker gets more glory from taking down a tough guy than a wimp. Looking batshit crazy is pretty effective; if I feel like I'm being followed and there isn't a convenient escape I smack my head a few times and start arguing with "the voices".
they picked a location on campus widely known among the student body for people getting raped. i was warned as a freshman during orientation not to go there after dark.
Theres probably variation from the background there, that drives clicks to that particular spot. Several of the red-female locations have blue-male dots at the same spot.
Yeah, what this data actually shows is that, in the situations tested, women tend to find darker areas of a picture more interesting and men tend to find lighter areas more interesting. Not as interesting of a headline though. I'm interested to see what the actual paper says, not some click bait pop-sci meme.
This is an overlay of every participant. So if 100 women clicked in the same 10 places, for instance, they would be red. While places 50 women clicked would be yellow.
Also, even if this was eye tracking of one person, it could still make sense. Red != 100%. Red is the place where the most time was spent looking. So of 1s was spent on all the dots, and everywhere else was less than 1s, then red. Comparing it to the male chart is what makes it seem off, but the comparison of color doesn't matter, it's the math.
I think their question was why would all the women click the same ten random places rather than spread the heat map out more broadly along the dark area?
Heat map images were analyzed using canonical correlation (Rc) to determine the relationship between the two groups; dispersion testing to decipher spatial uniformity within the images; the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) to characterize the nature of image patterns differences; and, the Breslow–Day Test to specify pattern locations within images.
Participants were given 16 images and asked to consider walking alone through the place in the picture. Using the Qualtrics heat map tool, they were instructed to imagine themselves walking through these areas and to click on the area(s) of the image that stood out to the most to them.
Source: the research article paper I linked above
Also, even if it was done with some type of eye tracking glasses, if you knew you were taking part in a study, would you be worried about what might happen, in comparison to how worried you are normally? Like I'm not gonna be worried about someone sneaking up on me if I know I'm being observed and more likely to be safe, so naturally I'd be more relaxed. I imagine the same applies for other people.
Yeah I’m a hard ground starer too. But def scanning periphery when not looking down. Especially at night when it’s most dangerous but I’ve always avoided going outside at night as much as possible.
In your defense, there's a lot of social pressure to go to BYU within the Mormon church, and most high school kids don't have the experience and knowledge to navigate the official and unofficial propaganda. I just happened to luck out that my parents pushed me not to go to BYU
Broad conclusions for a study conducted on a population of ~500 undergrad students at a single religious university in one city of one state of one country.
Doesn't the Jurassic Park power-restore scene align with this, too? Muldoon gets wrecked by a raptor on his side, while Ellie immediately notices/dodges the one that pokes through the wiring.
Wouldn't work, men don't just star blankly ahead, we scan the periphery without moving our eyes. We don't need to scan all around because our periphery is really good at spotting movement, this is why we can't see that thing in the fridge despite being right in front of us, it's not moving.
You joke, but when I worked in a grocery store people would ask for help finding something and nine times out of ten it was literally right in front of their face.
I feel like you should probably do this study again outside of BYU and more generally outside of Utah, Mormon culture especially Utah Mormon culture is weird and could definitely fuck with a study like this.
Though fun bit of personal experience with this exact scenario, my grandmother has better general visual awareness while my non visual awareness is a lot better overall. This means I subconsciously avoid things around me due to feel, sound, and smell but can be looking directly at something and not see it. Probably has something to do with the fact my eyesight is naturally fucked though, so my edge vision is basically useless for everything outside of movement since it's basically just a blurry blob.
I'm male but when I was a kid, my mom talked about stranger danger a lot and warned me about the supposed widespread kidnappings (was in China) and warned of "strangers following me home" I constantly just look around and glance back behind me every 30 seconds or so and check if someone is following me... and same thing when in the US too
I tend to turn it into a "casual sweep" of the scene. I'm looking at leaves, architecture, license plates! Well, and also getting a glimpse of whoever's around me. From being bullied in grade school, to learning to fly in college, with growing up as a young women between the two eras, situational awareness has become baked into my existence. But it's not a bad thing, it's a skill.
Tangentially, I wonder how much of this increased situational awareness plays into our famous "women's intuition"? If we're taking in more of our surroundings, it makes sense our unconscious minds will notice more readily when something's "off."
As well, I've often considered my "luck" to come down to increased awareness. When retrospectively thinking about a sequence of events, I can sometimes put together how noticing A led to me doing B, even if I didn't consciously think about it at the time. Like unconsciously noticing that a car in front of you is somewhat lopsided and getting the urge to switch lanes and pass them. You're not thinking about it. But later on when that car spins out on a flat tire, you're well past them - a safe distance away.
Or a situation that undoubtly makes people think I'm lucky - finding four-leaf clovers. A split-second scan of the ground and I can notice a four-leafer in a patch. Just a few months ago I was pumpkin-picking with my girlfriend and it happened again. We were standing outside and I was telling her about this exact phenomenon when I stopped, laughed, crouched down, plucked one particular clover, and handed it to her. "See?! It just happens!" I then proceeded to find two more, and at that point I knew I had to stop myself.
Im trans, grew up male thr first 28 years of my life, and I look around everywhere, not because I thought I was in danger but because I have ADHD and cant just look in one direction. I never feared for my well being while walking at night before transition and still dont after, but that fear was never instilled in me I guess.
I'd wager that women are taught to be aware of their surroundings for safety and men just don't ever get told, so unless there's an experience that teaches them, they tunnel vision.
Teaching situational awareness seems to be something that is lacking. Similar to critical thinking, I believe that there are skills we sometimes just don't get taught by our parents or natural experiences. These are things we hopefully learn over time, but having them called out while we develop isn't happening (I blame screens, but it's nuanced).
I tend to monologue to my kids when doing routine things, like loading the dishwasher (There's a big bowl over there that I need to save room for...) or driving (I can see a car on the on-ramp, it will want to be where I am in a few seconds, so I'm adjusting my speed); just pointing out things around me that have either a real impact or a potential one and why those items came to my attention.
Fun fact, that behaviour, which becomes more common among people living in areas with higher crime rates as a self-preservation technique, is viewed as suspicious behaviour by police, and is likely to get you tracked by security if you do it in a store.
“Why can’t we live in a world where women don’t have to think about these things? It’s heartbreaking to hear of things women close to me have dealt with,” Chaney said. “It would be nice to work towards a world where there is no difference between the heat maps in these sets of images. That is the hope of the public health discipline.”
I'm not convinced this phenomenon would disappear in a world where women don't have to think about these things. It could be an evolutionary psychology thing. Would have to repeat the experiment in different societies and environments to find out.
As a somewhat paranoid person, you better believe I ain't looking just straight ahead, even as a man. You never know who is nearby, waiting to confront you for any reason.
As a fellow paranoid person I assume you also make some effort to concral when you're looking around; tie your shoe, check yourself out in a store window, watch reflections on cars, etc.
If some sketchy guy is following me, I want to know, without them knowing I know.
We had people come into our grade school to give us advice like that.
They used to call him the Owl in highschool, not because of his rotating head but because of the inappropriate hooting noises he made whenever his future wife walked into the room.
It’d be nice to be able to walk down a street without making other people uncomfortable because men in general are less assholish than bears.
A part of it is large numbers bias. Very few people encounter bears, so very few people experience bear attacks. Even if every bear was predisposed to attacking people, there would still be very few bear attacks. But virtually everyone encounters men on a near daily basis. So even if the likelihood of an attack is extremely low on a case-by-case basis, the overall number of incidents is much higher simply because there are more cases of people encountering men.
That’s why the go-to response to “it’s not every man” essentially boils down to “sure, it’s not every man. But it’s enough of them…”
It’d be nice to be able to walk down a street without making other people uncomfortable because men in general are less assholish than bears.
Eh..... The vast majority of encounters with bears are generally with black bears where both sides are usually just scared of each other and scamper away.
I think most men just lack the perspective of just how vulnerable women are compared to men. Imagine if you lived in a world where you were surrounded by dudes the size of your average NFL lineman, and a non insignificant percent of them have a history of sexual violence towards someone your size...... You too might be nervous walking in the dark by yourself.
I am 6'3 with a cut weight around 245lb and I have to be mindful about how I carry myself, or how closely I walk near people to not make people of any sex uncomfortable. There's a reason a big jolly guy is a stereotype, no one is comfortable around a large dude with an attitude.
I am nervous walking in the dark by myself. I simultaneously am relatively tall and will be perceived as male by anyone, so I also try to be wary of how I might make anyone else nervous.
The actual experience that most women have of smaller aggressions even in safer contexts probably also plays a role. I'm probably nervous walking alone at night because of a combination of being physically quite weak in spite of my looks, having experienced bullying throughout my childhood so "unpleasant random encounters" is a concept engraved into my brain, and because I'm affected by reading/hearing about any kind of assault happening to people walking alone.
Replace the bullying with "random men being assholes/threatening/worse" and most women have all 3 of those factors as well.
Right... peripheral vision in general is better at motion, but shit for details. It's why sacchads happen seemingly at random; often something is signalled in the periphery, so the individual glances in that direction.
Also, another thing to consider is whether there's other people around and what their gender is. Consider the scenario of me (a man) walking down the street at night and there's one person around that I need to pass by to get where I'm going.
If I'm constantly moving my head to look around at everything, I'm going to look really shady and make other people worried. I'm just trying to get somewhere, so I'd rather not bother people, which means it's better to just look ahead and kinda ignore them, and trust that my peripheral vision will pick up any actual threats.
That all being said, this experiment wasn't set up to consider that at all. Especially since the study is from Brigham Young University (ew), and at a spot on campus referred to as "Rape Hill". So thinking this much about the study is probably a waste of ti.e
Well, a man who scanned the periphery would come across as shifty (“what’s he looking for? is he some kind of voyeur or predator? he’s not staring at that girl’s tits, is he, the creep?”), so looking straight ahead is kind of like keeping one’s hands where everyone can see them. Though granted the absence of likely threats would also have an influence.
Was going to say nearly the same. We're conditioned to always fabricate a guise of confidence and the body language you give off 'scanning the periphery' comes off as the opposite of that.
Go bird watching. Or squirrels. Something hard to spot that moves quickly.
Scan the treeline, or instead fixate on a point straight ahead.
Do what comes naturally first, then the opposite. What method "spots" the motion first?
See what method works better for you. Hope it helps!
I ride a motorcycle... When I was doing the MSF training (after riding illegally for years), I kept getting dinged for not turning my head to look into a turn. Thing is, I have excellent peripheral vision. I can see 90° to either side when I'm looking straight ahead - so I tend to keep my gaze straight ahead regardless of where my attention is...
yeah, i got dinged on my driver's test for not turning my head to look. because my eyes can rotate in their sockets, something the examiner did not consider.
Its been years since I took the course, but I believe one of the reasons for turning your head into a turn is "balance". It basically recenters yourself into the turn.
The other is not all helmets are made the same. Some are going to restrict your vision more than others.
Motorcycle Safety Foundation. They do rider training, then when you complete it it counts as your road test when you add the motorcycle endorsement to your license.
I'm absolutely flabbergasted that anyone walks anywhere without constantly scanning around them. How do people have the attention span to just look at where they are going and only where they are going?? And that is just the first hurdle I have...
I went to Japan with 3 friends, all of us male. The itinerary was public and shared, we made discussions on where we were going each day. In train stations and cities all 3 of them asked me how was it that I didnt need to pause and could just keep walking to our next location. I pointed out the signs with perfectly legible english/romanji. The signage in Japan is great.
I get compliments on my perception, and refer to it as a minor super power of mine, but I think it's because I'm just constantly looking around.
Leaves me wondering if this indicates some kind of biochemical/neurological difference, or just like sociological differences. Like are women processing vision differently from men, or is this happening just because women are more worried about getting attacked.
Women tend to also process visuals differently. I do think I've seen data that show men's eyes tend to be more sensitive to movement while women tend to have better color recognition on average. Movement is often also detectable in the periphery.
So when women look at dark areas they may see more things there in color, this may create a sort of feedback loop for night time visual behavior in addition to obvious sociological concerns.
The way to test for a visual feedback loop would probably be to evaluate night time driving (or other safer conditions) differences to see if women tend to look more at low light areas.
Alternately you could put men and women out in the woods and see if their behavior aligns.
Men and women also navigate differently. Men tend to navigate by direction and women tend to navigate by landmarks. I suppose looking around alot as a woman helps find those important landmarks.
I always wonder if women were the gathers becuase of how they navigate and look around, or were women the gathers becuase they could navigate by landmark and tend to look aound alot?
please do not get me started on how my mother gives directions she always includes turning at some animal. you know, those animate things that have lives and can move and not be there when i drive by.
it all started because she watched O Brother Where Art Thou and she thought "you will see a cow on a roof" was funny, and it was, and then she saw a goat with a hat on it on a drive to someplace and she was turning there and told everyone to turn at the goat with the hat. guess who was not there when everyone else was driving by oh gods i got started
For a moment I was going to reply something like "It's from Robot Wars Ⅶ: Geometry Strikes Back" but then I remembered https://xkcd.com/1053/ and how much I hate people in IT just plastering software logos without names onto slides/pages. Tl;dr: you're welcome. It's a great movie, but also very, very wrong.
I must be a woman cause I too am always looking around. But I get why women have to do this. Same reason they rather run into a bear in the woods rather then a man. It's fuck up but just proves as a collective us men need to do better.
This could also be evolutionary... Imagine 2 cavemen walking through a forest. The woman scans the periphery while the male focuses ahead. It may be an evolutionary thing.
I mean, there are plenty of studies and experiences that genuinely show women have not just a greater concern for their safety, especially at night, but are far more likely to be assaulted than men.
We just had somebody else in the thread show studies for how men are mugged more frequently than women. However I wouldn't be surprised if women are threatened cat called and assaulted more often, and are looking out for more than just violent criminals.
The only violent crimes that women are more likely to be victims of are sexual ones. Any nonsexual violent crime is more likely to have a male victim. Is this because women are more cautious? Maybe!
I’m not buying that heatmap data. Why are almost all the dots on the left red? That would mean that women pick a random spot and focus on that for an extended period of time before moving on to the next. This is not really how you’d investigate a scene. The right images are much more believable to me: Short glances at random points to get an overview of the scene and then re-investigating points of interest.
I am a man, though. Women: Do you really stare random points into oblivion?
Edit:
Ok, at first I thought this was actual eye tracking information. However,
Then the different-colored dots make even less sense. And why are there fringes?
Considering how common and easy eye tracking is, this seems like some shitty science.
whaaaat surely BYU, the school that claimed to have done cold fusion, is an upstanding pillar of academic research
i hate defending byu, but wasn't that UofU?
UwU?
Nah, UwU was a community college back then
I recently watched a BobbyBrocolli video on it, the controversy mostly surrounded UofU, a quick search shows that Pons and Fleischman are from UofU. The video also mentioned that BYU also claimed to discover cold fusion, but not the energy of the future self sustaining kind.
i must have missed ybu's announcement. no worries, there have been a lot of hoaxes in that area.
This would be the perfect use case for that fancy Apple VR headset they released a year or two so. Since it has built-in eye tracking, it would be easy to set up a test in a controlled environment where participants navigate it while looking around.
Navigating that scene in real life (or even simulated) would make the data orders of magnitude more annoying to interpret. On a static image you can just overlay all eye movements and produce a heatmap. But for a subject that’s actually (or virtually) moving, none of the data would coincide and you’d have to manually find out which focus points were actually equal.
Put the subject in an auto driving kart and make it go in same path for all of them
Sure, but any decent webcam and monitor can do this.
Shitty science at BYU? Surely not!
Study designed around a conclusion using a borderline invalid method.
I feel like utilizing eye tracking would be used if they were to study this concept more deeply. That data would be more complicated to sift through given how much data and how many variables might come into play. Definitely more telling but also harder to analyze.
How so?
https://sopuli.xyz/post/41573721/22043739
Thanks. But you can use eye tracking on static images with just a good webcam on a monitor.
Also in a live environment, presumed static (no people or traffic etc) image stabilization tech makes things much simpler.
Seems like a seriously flawed study, doezn't it, asking people to point to what's interesting is NOT AT ALL the same as tracking their eyes.
We could actually track their eye movement by using special glasses. Just call your study what it actually is, ffs... don't confuse the data.
...also, it has to do with attention on photos rather than real world going home experiences.
In the article they note that they participants were shown photos and told to click on areas that caught their attention. The results show that women paid more attention to the periphery. No eye tracking, no long focus.
As a woman, imagining situations like those: I can see the brightly lit center is empty, that's all I need to know about it. The stairs require several glances especially if I'm in heels or other unstable shoes. But those dark corners need checking and rechecking the whole time I'm walking, to be sure no tiny changes betray a lurker. Who is probably going to wait until they're at my back to make a move.
My mental image of the guys scanning the same image: "Yeah that's where I'm going, that's obviously where I'm looking." Sure, they could get mugged but it's less likely, and physical threat isn't on their mind.
This is completely untrue, men are (and always have been) the primary target of random violence such as mugging. According to FBI crime statistics it's hugely disproportional year after year. Women are disproportionately victimized by their intimate partners, both male and female. Both of these facts are beyond tragic but it is, in my opinion, really important to get these things straight. Women are more likely to scream for help when they are being robbed which leads them to being de-prioritized when violent criminals are choosing their targets. Men tend to submit, and are likely to avoid reporting it due to shame, so the disparity is probably significantly higher than the already gigantic reported disparity.
Hope you don't see this as me just trying to stir shit cause I'm not. It just really irks me to see that sentiment repeated even though it's entirely unsubstantiated. I'm a man of small stature and a minority. With awareness of the reality of the situation, the threat of physical violence is literally always on my mind. I've had a solid handful of random encounters in public that very nearly turned violent and it causes me pretty severe anxiety.
Don't know why I felt like typing a novel over this, like I said though I guess I just find it frustrating. I can't talk to my female friends about this, they just laugh at me. They talk about it like I'm wholly immune to violence by virtue of being male when it couldn't be further from the truth.
Edit with data from FBI crime data explorer: Over the last 10 years it's 906k male victims of robbery to 474k female victims, and (though it doesn't need to be said) that's just about double.
My point wasn’t that women aren’t looking at the surroundings, but that they don’t do it as is portrayed in the image. You said it yourself: “checking and rechecking the whole time” That doesn’t match singular hotspots, but rather a more spread-out heatmap with peaks at certain positions.
I was mugged in the playground of my building, the street across fine my house, my lobby, and at 57th and suttton, all in Manhattan. Then a few more times when I lived in Baltimore. I really hope most women don't get raped that often.
I hope you've started scanning the dark periphery like we do. Not because you deserved anything that happened to you! And I'm not assuming you weren't already. But because I can't do anything to protect you from over here on the Internet and I don't want that to happen to you anymore. It's when we're near home that we tend to let our guard down.
Thank you. I've taken a much more holistic approach. It's worked very well. Haven't been mugged in decades.
Many of them likely aren't immediately useful to most people but here goes.
1 I got older, got a few degrees, got paid a bunch and have been living in areas with extremely low street crime. I could probably pass out in front of my house with a Benji sticking out of my fly and it would still be there in the morning.
2 I quit drinking. That wasn't an issue when I was a kid but later on it provided 2 huge benefits: 2.a) My situational awareness is never impaired. 2.b) It eliminated the vast majority of situations where someone might find me an interesting target.
3 I spent an absurd amount of time practicing and studying martial arts. The fighting parts of that aren't that useful but many RBSD (Reality Based Self Defense) classes are actually practical. tl;dr It's now fairly easy to find actual statistics on many forms of violence, look up the most likely ones for you, find the proven counters and practice those. For example, I've done a ton of drills that are a variation of shoving an attacker, yelling "Get away from me you PERVERT" (because while people tend to ignore cries for help, everyone wants to know who the pervert is), and running away.
4 Closely related to 3 is the general realization that you don't need to make yourself immune to violence. It's hard to be a good fighter and it's hard to make yourself the least attractive target. It's pretty easy to avoid being the most attractive target. For example, men are often targeted by men who want to exert dominance. Looking tough is counter productive because the attacker gets more glory from taking down a tough guy than a wimp. Looking batshit crazy is pretty effective; if I feel like I'm being followed and there isn't a convenient escape I smack my head a few times and start arguing with "the voices".
they picked a location on campus widely known among the student body for people getting raped. i was warned as a freshman during orientation not to go there after dark.
Um. Holy shit. How does a known place on campus not get corrected immediately.
that's the neat thing! they expel the students who get raped, not the rapists. that way they can keep their crime statistics low.
It's probably 1 click = blue, right? The more clicks overlap at a certain point the closer to red.
And all women telepathically agreed on which exact pixels to click?
Theres probably variation from the background there, that drives clicks to that particular spot. Several of the red-female locations have blue-male dots at the same spot.
Isn't it like a video game, where you look to where people might be hiding?
Yeah, what this data actually shows is that, in the situations tested, women tend to find darker areas of a picture more interesting and men tend to find lighter areas more interesting. Not as interesting of a headline though. I'm interested to see what the actual paper says, not some click bait pop-sci meme.
To your edit: The dots do make sense.
This is an overlay of every participant. So if 100 women clicked in the same 10 places, for instance, they would be red. While places 50 women clicked would be yellow.
Also, even if this was eye tracking of one person, it could still make sense. Red != 100%. Red is the place where the most time was spent looking. So of 1s was spent on all the dots, and everywhere else was less than 1s, then red. Comparing it to the male chart is what makes it seem off, but the comparison of color doesn't matter, it's the math.
I think their question was why would all the women click the same ten random places rather than spread the heat map out more broadly along the dark area?
Exactly, thanks.
Ahh, that's more clear then, sorry!
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/vio.2023.0027
Basically:
@[email protected]
I look mostly at the ground to avoid stepping on dog poo.
Edit: looks like the study was not done using eye tracking and was instead done with pictures:
https://news.byu.edu/intellect/study-visually-captures-hard-truth-walking-home-at-night-is-not-the-same-for-women <- news thing
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/vio.2023.0027 <- paper
Source: the research article paper I linked above
Also, even if it was done with some type of eye tracking glasses, if you knew you were taking part in a study, would you be worried about what might happen, in comparison to how worried you are normally? Like I'm not gonna be worried about someone sneaking up on me if I know I'm being observed and more likely to be safe, so naturally I'd be more relaxed. I imagine the same applies for other people.
Yeah I’m a hard ground starer too. But def scanning periphery when not looking down. Especially at night when it’s most dangerous but I’ve always avoided going outside at night as much as possible.
that location at BYU specifically is informally known as Rape Hill, so of course the women aren't looking straight ahead
i know i'm very glib and i joke a lot, but i'm deadly serious right now.
Makes sense for the school that expels women for being assaulted. As if I needed another reason to hate BYU
They call it nonconsensual immorality
https://apnews.com/general-news-domestic-news-domestic-news-6b3c434ba4ab476f904fa5652fad01ee
He said rape is bad, but also any sex outside of marriage is bad.
So, by his logic, raping someone is no worse than getting consent if you aren't married.
https://floodlit.org/
Rape is often treated lighter than consensual sex
Human rights in the mena countries still a millennium behind
Mormons are in Utah 🫣
What the actual fuck
i can give you good reasons or bad reasons i got them all. one of the worst mistakes i made was attending there.
In your defense, there's a lot of social pressure to go to BYU within the Mormon church, and most high school kids don't have the experience and knowledge to navigate the official and unofficial propaganda. I just happened to luck out that my parents pushed me not to go to BYU
i like your parents
Broad conclusions for a study conducted on a population of ~500 undergrad students at a single religious university in one city of one state of one country.
Based on reaction to images, clicking with a mouse where subjects looked
Could just as easily be a study on how different sexes respond to the same instruction
Noted. Attack men from the side, women from the front 😎
Doesn't the Jurassic Park power-restore scene align with this, too? Muldoon gets wrecked by a raptor on his side, while Ellie immediately notices/dodges the one that pokes through the wiring.
Wouldn't work, men don't just star blankly ahead, we scan the periphery without moving our eyes. We don't need to scan all around because our periphery is really good at spotting movement, this is why we can't see that thing in the fridge despite being right in front of us, it's not moving.
You joke, but when I worked in a grocery store people would ask for help finding something and nine times out of ten it was literally right in front of their face.
Did they ask you for the most beautiful person on the store?
But attacking women from the front would work??
I feel like you should probably do this study again outside of BYU and more generally outside of Utah, Mormon culture especially Utah Mormon culture is weird and could definitely fuck with a study like this.
Though fun bit of personal experience with this exact scenario, my grandmother has better general visual awareness while my non visual awareness is a lot better overall. This means I subconsciously avoid things around me due to feel, sound, and smell but can be looking directly at something and not see it. Probably has something to do with the fact my eyesight is naturally fucked though, so my edge vision is basically useless for everything outside of movement since it's basically just a blurry blob.
Ah yes, let's study a cult, that seems like a splendid effort
I'm male but when I was a kid, my mom talked about stranger danger a lot and warned me about the supposed widespread kidnappings (was in China) and warned of "strangers following me home" I constantly just look around and glance back behind me every 30 seconds or so and check if someone is following me... and same thing when in the US too
This habit just stuck with me...
I probably look weird af lol
I tend to turn it into a "casual sweep" of the scene. I'm looking at leaves, architecture, license plates! Well, and also getting a glimpse of whoever's around me. From being bullied in grade school, to learning to fly in college, with growing up as a young women between the two eras, situational awareness has become baked into my existence. But it's not a bad thing, it's a skill.
Tangentially, I wonder how much of this increased situational awareness plays into our famous "women's intuition"? If we're taking in more of our surroundings, it makes sense our unconscious minds will notice more readily when something's "off."
As well, I've often considered my "luck" to come down to increased awareness. When retrospectively thinking about a sequence of events, I can sometimes put together how noticing A led to me doing B, even if I didn't consciously think about it at the time. Like unconsciously noticing that a car in front of you is somewhat lopsided and getting the urge to switch lanes and pass them. You're not thinking about it. But later on when that car spins out on a flat tire, you're well past them - a safe distance away.
Or a situation that undoubtly makes people think I'm lucky - finding four-leaf clovers. A split-second scan of the ground and I can notice a four-leafer in a patch. Just a few months ago I was pumpkin-picking with my girlfriend and it happened again. We were standing outside and I was telling her about this exact phenomenon when I stopped, laughed, crouched down, plucked one particular clover, and handed it to her. "See?! It just happens!" I then proceeded to find two more, and at that point I knew I had to stop myself.
So yeah, it's not all bad. :)
Im trans, grew up male thr first 28 years of my life, and I look around everywhere, not because I thought I was in danger but because I have ADHD and cant just look in one direction. I never feared for my well being while walking at night before transition and still dont after, but that fear was never instilled in me I guess.
I'd wager that women are taught to be aware of their surroundings for safety and men just don't ever get told, so unless there's an experience that teaches them, they tunnel vision.
Teaching situational awareness seems to be something that is lacking. Similar to critical thinking, I believe that there are skills we sometimes just don't get taught by our parents or natural experiences. These are things we hopefully learn over time, but having them called out while we develop isn't happening (I blame screens, but it's nuanced).
I tend to monologue to my kids when doing routine things, like loading the dishwasher (There's a big bowl over there that I need to save room for...) or driving (I can see a car on the on-ramp, it will want to be where I am in a few seconds, so I'm adjusting my speed); just pointing out things around me that have either a real impact or a potential one and why those items came to my attention.
Fun fact, that behaviour, which becomes more common among people living in areas with higher crime rates as a self-preservation technique, is viewed as suspicious behaviour by police, and is likely to get you tracked by security if you do it in a store.
It also attracts the attention of people who are looking for an easy mark. Looking around nervously makes you look like a target in bad neighborhoods.
I don't trust Mormon findings until they are peer reviewed.
Until you learn the peers reviewing are more Mormons.
Mormons only consider other Mormons peers, so that checks out.
I'm not convinced this phenomenon would disappear in a world where women don't have to think about these things. It could be an evolutionary psychology thing. Would have to repeat the experiment in different societies and environments to find out.
Really? I scan the environment too, even check for snipers.
Watch out! He is behi
Crazy coincidence that he fell on his keyboard in a way that did send the comment but did not add any random letters to the message
That was clearly not a sniper, but Candlejack making a comeb
New proof that I am indeed a woman just dropped 💅🏻
Take that transphobes !
As a somewhat paranoid person, you better believe I ain't looking just straight ahead, even as a man. You never know who is nearby, waiting to confront you for any reason.
As a fellow paranoid person I assume you also make some effort to concral when you're looking around; tie your shoe, check yourself out in a store window, watch reflections on cars, etc.
If some sketchy guy is following me, I want to know, without them knowing I know.
We had people come into our grade school to give us advice like that.
Guess I'm a woman now. Thanks PTSD. Didn't even get the boobs.
I'm in the same boat. My wife is oblivious most of the time while my head is on a swivel.
They used to call him the Owl in highschool, not because of his rotating head but because of the inappropriate hooting noises he made whenever his future wife walked into the room.
Even if this was a conclusive study (sounds like there’s some issues there with selection and methodology,)….
This is probably because women are more likely to be harassed/assaulted/raped/mugged/etc.
Other vulnerable groups (trans, immigrants, etc) are probably are also scanning and maintaining better situational awareness.
It’d be nice to be able to walk down a street without making other people uncomfortable because men in general are less assholish than bears.
A part of it is large numbers bias. Very few people encounter bears, so very few people experience bear attacks. Even if every bear was predisposed to attacking people, there would still be very few bear attacks. But virtually everyone encounters men on a near daily basis. So even if the likelihood of an attack is extremely low on a case-by-case basis, the overall number of incidents is much higher simply because there are more cases of people encountering men.
That’s why the go-to response to “it’s not every man” essentially boils down to “sure, it’s not every man. But it’s enough of them…”
Eh..... The vast majority of encounters with bears are generally with black bears where both sides are usually just scared of each other and scamper away.
I think most men just lack the perspective of just how vulnerable women are compared to men. Imagine if you lived in a world where you were surrounded by dudes the size of your average NFL lineman, and a non insignificant percent of them have a history of sexual violence towards someone your size...... You too might be nervous walking in the dark by yourself.
I am 6'3 with a cut weight around 245lb and I have to be mindful about how I carry myself, or how closely I walk near people to not make people of any sex uncomfortable. There's a reason a big jolly guy is a stereotype, no one is comfortable around a large dude with an attitude.
I am nervous walking in the dark by myself. I simultaneously am relatively tall and will be perceived as male by anyone, so I also try to be wary of how I might make anyone else nervous.
The actual experience that most women have of smaller aggressions even in safer contexts probably also plays a role. I'm probably nervous walking alone at night because of a combination of being physically quite weak in spite of my looks, having experienced bullying throughout my childhood so "unpleasant random encounters" is a concept engraved into my brain, and because I'm affected by reading/hearing about any kind of assault happening to people walking alone.
Replace the bullying with "random men being assholes/threatening/worse" and most women have all 3 of those factors as well.
TIL i'm a woman
🩵🩷🤍🩷🩵
Source: https://news.byu.edu/intellect/study-visually-captures-hard-truth-walking-home-at-night-is-not-the-same-for-women
I wouldn't be looking at any of that, where's the smartphone showing dumb memes?
Is this Loss?
Men are better at detecting motion. I would bet men are better at detecting motion in their perephiral vision too.
Right... peripheral vision in general is better at motion, but shit for details. It's why sacchads happen seemingly at random; often something is signalled in the periphery, so the individual glances in that direction.
Also, another thing to consider is whether there's other people around and what their gender is. Consider the scenario of me (a man) walking down the street at night and there's one person around that I need to pass by to get where I'm going.
If I'm constantly moving my head to look around at everything, I'm going to look really shady and make other people worried. I'm just trying to get somewhere, so I'd rather not bother people, which means it's better to just look ahead and kinda ignore them, and trust that my peripheral vision will pick up any actual threats.
That all being said, this experiment wasn't set up to consider that at all. Especially since the study is from Brigham Young University (ew), and at a spot on campus referred to as "Rape Hill". So thinking this much about the study is probably a waste of ti.e
Well, a man who scanned the periphery would come across as shifty (“what’s he looking for? is he some kind of voyeur or predator? he’s not staring at that girl’s tits, is he, the creep?”), so looking straight ahead is kind of like keeping one’s hands where everyone can see them. Though granted the absence of likely threats would also have an influence.
Was going to say nearly the same. We're conditioned to always fabricate a guise of confidence and the body language you give off 'scanning the periphery' comes off as the opposite of that.
Alright yall, experiment time.
Go bird watching. Or squirrels. Something hard to spot that moves quickly.
Scan the treeline, or instead fixate on a point straight ahead. Do what comes naturally first, then the opposite. What method "spots" the motion first?
See what method works better for you. Hope it helps!
I ride a motorcycle... When I was doing the MSF training (after riding illegally for years), I kept getting dinged for not turning my head to look into a turn. Thing is, I have excellent peripheral vision. I can see 90° to either side when I'm looking straight ahead - so I tend to keep my gaze straight ahead regardless of where my attention is...
yeah, i got dinged on my driver's test for not turning my head to look. because my eyes can rotate in their sockets, something the examiner did not consider.
Its been years since I took the course, but I believe one of the reasons for turning your head into a turn is "balance". It basically recenters yourself into the turn.
The other is not all helmets are made the same. Some are going to restrict your vision more than others.
The other reason is it communicates to other people in the environment.
If they're paying attention, which I would never assume...
MSF?
Motorcycle Safety Foundation. They do rider training, then when you complete it it counts as your road test when you add the motorcycle endorsement to your license.
I thought these were guitar hero screenshots at first
We'll never get better game sense if we don't keep an eye on our surroundings!!!
That's why I can never find anything and have to ask my girlfriend for help. I'm bad at scanning the periphery.
This is what peripheral vision is for.
Yeah, peripheral is better to detect subtle movement in low contrast areas.
Doomguy is a woman, confirmed.
I'm absolutely flabbergasted that anyone walks anywhere without constantly scanning around them. How do people have the attention span to just look at where they are going and only where they are going?? And that is just the first hurdle I have...
I went to Japan with 3 friends, all of us male. The itinerary was public and shared, we made discussions on where we were going each day. In train stations and cities all 3 of them asked me how was it that I didnt need to pause and could just keep walking to our next location. I pointed out the signs with perfectly legible english/romanji. The signage in Japan is great.
I get compliments on my perception, and refer to it as a minor super power of mine, but I think it's because I'm just constantly looking around.
/signed by someone who is also flabberghasted
Leaves me wondering if this indicates some kind of biochemical/neurological difference, or just like sociological differences. Like are women processing vision differently from men, or is this happening just because women are more worried about getting attacked.
Women tend to also process visuals differently. I do think I've seen data that show men's eyes tend to be more sensitive to movement while women tend to have better color recognition on average. Movement is often also detectable in the periphery.
So when women look at dark areas they may see more things there in color, this may create a sort of feedback loop for night time visual behavior in addition to obvious sociological concerns.
The way to test for a visual feedback loop would probably be to evaluate night time driving (or other safer conditions) differences to see if women tend to look more at low light areas.
Alternately you could put men and women out in the woods and see if their behavior aligns.
Uh... It's complicated, but
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_fear_of_crime
Long story short, the less likely the crime, the more women are afraid of it happening to them.
(And yes, this sentence is very slightly cherry picking data to provoke people to read the wikipedia page).
Would need to compare it to the same data sampled from different places.
Men and women also navigate differently. Men tend to navigate by direction and women tend to navigate by landmarks. I suppose looking around alot as a woman helps find those important landmarks.
I always wonder if women were the gathers becuase of how they navigate and look around, or were women the gathers becuase they could navigate by landmark and tend to look aound alot?
please do not get me started on how my mother gives directions she always includes turning at some animal. you know, those animate things that have lives and can move and not be there when i drive by.
it all started because she watched O Brother Where Art Thou and she thought "you will see a cow on a roof" was funny, and it was, and then she saw a goat with a hat on it on a drive to someplace and she was turning there and told everyone to turn at the goat with the hat. guess who was not there when everyone else was driving by oh gods i got started
I aggressively look every direction. Mine is 360
what is this from it looks amazing
It's that scene in Pinocchio when he's busting out of that whale using the lazer vision his godmother gave to him
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelion%3A_1.0_You_Are_%28Not%29_Alone - the Ramiel encounter, specifically.
thank you so much I appreciate you sharing that information
For a moment I was going to reply something like "It's from Robot Wars Ⅶ: Geometry Strikes Back" but then I remembered https://xkcd.com/1053/ and how much I hate people in IT just plastering software logos without names onto slides/pages. Tl;dr: you're welcome. It's a great movie, but also very, very wrong.
As a transfem I am always looking for the bear :3
(NV reference)
What is a BYU study ? DDG returns a mormon thing
BYU = Brigham Young University. Famously mormon.
Thanks for the context
Something Something University?
No source, no sample size, just content to make people angry.
I put the source in the comments: https://news.byu.edu/intellect/study-visually-captures-hard-truth-walking-home-at-night-is-not-the-same-for-women
Factor in trauma x gender otherwise the data worthless.
Yeah I'm a guy who focuses so much on my surroundings. My trauma score is pretty high as well
Is there anything about us that does not suck? I want to go a day without thinking the world would be better if we all died.
I must be a woman cause I too am always looking around. But I get why women have to do this. Same reason they rather run into a bear in the woods rather then a man. It's fuck up but just proves as a collective us men need to do better.
This could also be evolutionary... Imagine 2 cavemen walking through a forest. The woman scans the periphery while the male focuses ahead. It may be an evolutionary thing.
Men have better peripheral vision.
Aware people look about. Unaware people don't. But yeah, let's divide it by gender.
I mean, there are plenty of studies and experiences that genuinely show women have not just a greater concern for their safety, especially at night, but are far more likely to be assaulted than men.
We just had somebody else in the thread show studies for how men are mugged more frequently than women. However I wouldn't be surprised if women are threatened cat called and assaulted more often, and are looking out for more than just violent criminals.
The only violent crimes that women are more likely to be victims of are sexual ones. Any nonsexual violent crime is more likely to have a male victim. Is this because women are more cautious? Maybe!