My guess on the question of "Why men don't listen" is that it's more of an individual behavior issue, but it could be related to what I'm about to say about the directions.
The answer is quite simple: Men don't ask for directions because we don't understand them when we get them.
There were some studies done a few years back (and I wish I could cite the source) that seemed to indicate that when it comes to navigation, men do better with maps (i.e. a drawn representation of the course), while women do better with verbal/landmark based instructions.
Men prefer maps over directions. Women prefer directions over maps.
The "men don't ask for directions" cliche is fairly well known, but there also is the flip side of the coin: the image of the man driving, while a woman in the passenger seat struggles to read the map.
So, what happens when you're lost and you ask for directions? You get a verbal description. You get a set of instructions that come in a form that the man is least likely to understand, and the fact is that by the time he gets back to the car he's probably already realizing he doesn't know for sure what the instructions were, and he's feeling frustrated. (OK, to be fair, I'm describing how I feel.)
So, we don't stop to ask for instructions at all. Why bother, when they're not going to work for us anyway?
We don't explain this, because for the most part we don't even understand that we don't understand the issue.
Now if there was a system where we could stop, ask where we were going, and the person could instantly hand over a map...well, that we would go for (and the cliche would be "How come women never stop and ask for a map when they're lost?")
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Re: more of my two cents
Date: 2006-10-20 09:09 pm (UTC)The answer is quite simple: Men don't ask for directions because we don't understand them when we get them.
There were some studies done a few years back (and I wish I could cite the source) that seemed to indicate that when it comes to navigation, men do better with maps (i.e. a drawn representation of the course), while women do better with verbal/landmark based instructions.
Men prefer maps over directions. Women prefer directions over maps.
The "men don't ask for directions" cliche is fairly well known, but there also is the flip side of the coin: the image of the man driving, while a woman in the passenger seat struggles to read the map.
So, what happens when you're lost and you ask for directions? You get a verbal description. You get a set of instructions that come in a form that the man is least likely to understand, and the fact is that by the time he gets back to the car he's probably already realizing he doesn't know for sure what the instructions were, and he's feeling frustrated. (OK, to be fair, I'm describing how I feel.)
So, we don't stop to ask for instructions at all. Why bother, when they're not going to work for us anyway?
We don't explain this, because for the most part we don't even understand that we don't understand the issue.
Now if there was a system where we could stop, ask where we were going, and the person could instantly hand over a map...well, that we would go for (and the cliche would be "How come women never stop and ask for a map when they're lost?")