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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
Really? I scan the environment too, even check for snipers.
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.
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
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
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.
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…”
Men have better peripheral vision.
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
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
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.
We’ll never get better game sense if we don’t keep an eye on our surroundings!!!
I thought these were guitar hero screenshots at first
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?
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.
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.
Considering how common and easy eye tracking is, this seems like some shitty science.
Shitty science at BYU? Surely not!
Study designed around a conclusion using a borderline invalid method.
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?
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.
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?
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.
[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?
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.
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.
Sure, they could get mugged but it’s less likely
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.
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.
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’m not buying that heatmap data.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I don’t know you, I don’t know where in the world you live and what the crime statistics are there, but you don’t have to be paranoid to take reasonable precautions. Being aware of your environment isn’t paranoia. People can be attacked anywhere in the world.
As a self defense instructor, the most important advice I give people is to leave your senses unimpeded and trust your intuition. If something feels wrong, take action (usually evade and escape if possible) and do so right away. Don’t just tell yourself “it’s probably nothing, it’ll be fine.”
Obviously, if you have an actual psychological condition that gives you undue stress in relatively safe conditions, that’s probably something you could see a mental health professional about.
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.
“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.
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
