People in countries that value masculine traits are more likely to overestimate their navigation abilities, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.
The authors of the new Scientific Reports paper found that those in Germanic and Eastern European countries were most likely to overestimate their navigation skills, while those in Nordic and East Asian countries underestimated their abilities.
The study involved 383,187 people who were playing a mobile game called Sea Hero Quest, which tests wayfinding abilities using a task where game players navigate a boat through a virtual environment to find checkpoints shown on a map. Sea Hero Quest is a citizen science venture designed for neuroscience research, created by Deutsche Telekom in partnership with Alzheimer’s Research UK, UCL, UEA and game developers Glitchers.
The researchers say this is the first study to show a link between cultural values and cognitive performance at such a large scale, pulling together data from 46 countries.
The research team compared participants’ self-estimated abilities to their actual performance, while also analysing how it compared to country-level factors. While people’s own estimates of their abilities were aligned to some extent with their actual performance, the researchers found that in some countries, led by Austria, people had a general tendency to rate their abilities more highly than their actual performance would warrant, while others underestimate their abilities, particularly people in Finland.
2023-08-07 15:48:02
Post from phys.org