BEACHCOMBER 105 YEARS OLD AND STILL FASCINATED BY GENDER...
A FEW weeks ago I offered advice based on toilet paper hanging, pullover removal and fingernail examination, on how to tell the difference between males and females. Since then, our Head of State and Prime Minister have changed gender, which prompts me to add the most interesting sex discriminator of all: wobbly tables.
This was told to me long ago by my old, now sadly departed friend, the eminent psychologist Peter Wason. Always intrigued by human processes, he loved to pose puzzles and published a great deal of research on the topic of thinking. This one, as far as I know, he never published but he told me it was the non-sex-related question that produced the strongest difference in responses from intelligent men and women. The question comes in two parts which I recommend you think about before reading on:
1. You have a four-legged table that wobbles. What do you do?
2. You have a threelegged table that wobbles. What do you do?
Wason liked to pose these questions at informal academic gatherings at which both men and women were present and then he would look for a difference in the replies he received from men and women.
There was no significant difference in the answers to the first question: everyone would stick a beermat under the shortest leg, or cut down the longest leg to eliminate the wobble. In reply to the second question, women usually said they would do the same, while men pointed out that threelegged tables cannot wobble. Wason’s explanation of the sex-difference in response pattern was when faced with a problem, women will try to solve it while men will conceptualise it. Women, he said, are results orientated so will concentrate on stopping the wobble, while men are process orientated, so their attention will concentrate on determining its cause.
Our recent history might be taken to support this opinion. A female Prime Minister saw a bad economic wobble and set about trying to cure it; her male successor began by thinking about it.
Nothing, however, can beat the answer I received from one aristocratic male. When I asked what he would do if his four-legged table wobbled, he just said: “Well, move to another table, of course.”