Men Cannot Think Clearly When Around Women

By Margarita Nahapetyan

It has not been a secret that some men at times get confused in the presence of women and hardly can find any words to say, but now Dutch researchers claim that men experience a decline in mental performance when interacting, or even just thinking about women.

To come up with such an interesting conclusion, scientists from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, conducted two trials that involved 71 heterosexual students, both male and female. In the first experiment all the participants were asked to complete the Stroop test, in which a person is shown, for example, the word "blue" in red ink, or the word "red" in green ink, and they have to quickly figure out the color of the ink used in for the word. The meaning of the word interferes with the brain's attempt to correctly name the color of the ink, and when a person is mentally tired, he or she will do it much more slowly.

Participants then were asked to sit in front of a web camera and read some Dutch words aloud. They were told that during this "lip reading" experiment an observer of either the same or opposite sex would watch them via the web cam. Afterwards, the participants took the Stroop test for the second time in order to determine if there were any changes in their mental performance. As it was anticipated, guys scored worse on Stroop tasks when they thought that a woman had been observing them talk. Women, however, performed without any problem both before and after the lip-reading exercise, regardless of the observer's gender.

In a second experiment, the team of scientists again asked each participant to take a Stroop test and told them that following the test there will be the same lip reading exercise as in the first trial, and once again, half of the students were told that a man would be watching them, and the other half were told that a woman would be an observer. However, the actual lip reading test never happened. Instead, the participants took another Stroop test as a result of which, the female students demonstrated the same stable performance, no matter which gender they thought was watching them during lip reading. As to the guys, those who were told that their observer would be a woman performed much worse during the second experiment, demonstrating that even just anticipating being observed by females, with no actual face-to-face contact with them, was already enough to cause a decline in their cognitive performance.

The Dutch researchers say that it remains unclear to them as to what causes this temporary decline in men's mental performance. They theorize that it could be due to men's instinctive search for mating opportunities. Another assumption is that men are under constant social pressure in order to impress the opposite sex during social interactions, which strains their mental power.

The new findings are published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior journal.