Now watch very closely as – poof! – it’s gone. Social psychologists are becoming rather brilliant at setting up these gender difference sleights of hand. The examples are piling up in all sorts of domains – from social sensitivity to chess to negotiation – but the pièce de resistance is the visuospatial skill of mental rotation performance. In the classic and most widely used test of this ability, the test taker is shown an unfamiliar three-dimensional shape made up of little cubes – the target – and four other similar shapes. Two of these are the same as the original but have been rotated in three-dimensional space, and two are mirror images. The task is to work out which two are the same as the target. Mental rotation performance is the largest and most reliable gender difference in cognition. In a typical sample, about 75 percent of people who score above average are male.1 Gender differences in mental rotation ability have even recently been seen in babies three to four and five months of age.2 While it’s easy to see that a high score on the mental rotation test would be a distinct advantage when it comes to playing Tetris, some also claim (although they’re often strongly disputed) that male superiority in this domain plays a significant role in explaining males’ better representation in science, engineering and maths.3 People’s mental rotation ability is malleable; it can be greatly enhanced by training.4 But there are far quicker, easier ways to modulate mental rotation ability.
