Page 16 - IAV Digital Magazine #434

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
Men Better at Scrabble As Women Wo n ’ t Wa s t e T i me P r a c t i c i n g UselessSkills, FindsStudy
By Lydia Smith
Men generally out- perform women
in Scrabble tourna- ments because female competitors are less willing to spend their time improving a largely pointless skill, according to new research.
Scientists found male players spend their time practising ana- grams and analysing the game, whereas women are more likely to play the game as a hobby.
The research, pub- lished in the jour- nal Psychological Research, found there is no inherent difference in talent between genders.
Yet, despite the fact there are slightly more
female participants in Scrabble tourna- ments, male play- ers tend to domi- nate them.
To find out why, University of Miami researcher Dr Jerad Moxley and his colleagues questioned 300 participants at the 2004 and 2008 US National Scrabble tournaments about their playing habits.
The scientists then analysed how the participants spent their time against their game ratings, which showed men tended to outper- form women in the competitions.
Dr Moxley found both men and women were put- ting the same num- ber of hours into playing the game, but significantly,
they spent their time differently.
Men spent the hours analysing the moves of past winners and prac- tising their ana- grams.
Women, on the other hand, spent their hours playing Scrabble – an enjoyable game deemed largely useless for building skills by the scien- tists – for fun, treating it as a hobby.
The researchers found female par- ticipants played the game to be happy.
“Just because there is a huge gender difference, it doesn’t mean there is a huge ability
gap," Dr Moxley tol d The Times.
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine