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Stereotype stuffs up women's driving

Calling women lousy drivers may be a self-fulfilling prophecy because it disrupts their focus and makes them more likely to run over pedestrians, new research suggests.

An Australian study found that women who are told that men are better drivers are more than twice as likely to collide with jaywalking pedestrians as other women in a similar test.

Dr Courtney von Hippel from the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland and team publish their study in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention.

"When people are confronted with negative stereotypes about themselves they seem to experience an additional cognitive load, which can decrease their performance on a task," says von Hippel.

"There can be subtle things happening in the environment while a woman is driving, like a male driver shaking his head when she tries to reverse park a car."

There have been hundreds of studies about the 'stereotype threat' effect since the idea was first discussed in psychology in the mid 1990s.

But most have focused on verbal and written tests rather than an applied task. This one shows how stereotyping can undermine women's performance during a driving simulation study.

The researchers recruited 168 female university students. Half the participants in one experiment heard that the study would investigate why men are better drivers than women and were told that the simulation would test the gender difference in driving abilities.

The control group heard no mention of gender differences but were told that the driving task would investigate the mental processes involved in driving.

Nearly half of the drivers in the 'stereotype threat' group hit a jaywalking pedestrian who unexpectedly appeared in the simulation.

Another experiment used the same driving simulation to show that participants who were distracted by a grammatical test were also twice as likely to hit the jaywalker.

"For safety reasons, our stereotype threat manipulation had to be quite contrived," says von Hippel.

"But it shows that it would be worth doing a more thorough investigation, perhaps an observational study, to discover what is going on here."