We tend to think that women are better than men at handling several things at once. But a new study from Brunel University in London offers an unexpected explanation for that stereotype. It seems the issue is not multitasking itself, but what happens when things become truly stressful.
In the experiment, 78 volunteers performed five tasks at the same time: they cooked from a recipe using toy ingredients, looked up phone numbers, completed letter-and-number tasks, tracked words on a screen, and answered questions coming from a speaker every 20 seconds. They were asked to respond not with one-word answers, but as if they were talking to a friend.
On the first four tasks, men and women performed almost identically. The only difference appeared in the conversation. Women left about 11.6% of the questions unanswered, while men left 27.7% unanswered. The quality of the answers did not differ.
In the second part of the study, 160 people watched short videos of the participants and rated how confident they seemed, how in control they were, how well they handled the tasks, and how competent they appeared. Women received higher scores on almost all measures, even though the actual task results were nearly the same.
It turned out that the evaluators were almost entirely guided by how actively the participant kept up the conversation. Psychologists explain this with the so-called “horns effect”: if a person makes one noticeable mistake, others automatically begin to judge their other qualities more harshly as well.
The study is a reminder that sometimes a few unanswered questions do not mean someone is doing worse at the job — only that they have focused on something else at that moment. And that is worth remembering, both at work and in everyday life.
