EVER notice how some men appear stymied going into a supermarket.
The purposeful stride slackens. The eyes lose focus. The shoulders slouch.
They go down an aisle but are soon completely lost, ending up following the signs dangling from the ceiling.
Even these are not much help because once in front of the rows of laundry detergents, they have to peer carefully at labels before making their pick.
In contrast, women are the opposite.
Once through the doors of a supermarket, their eyes light up. Their posture stiffens and off they go, with the accuracy of a cruise missile.
Administrative manager Douglas Tan perhaps hit the nail on the head when he confessed that walking into a supermarket makes him uncomfortable.
The bigger the supermarket, the more exasperated he becomes, said the 29-year-old.
“There are just too many colours, too many choices, that I feel as if I’m drowning in sensory stimuli,” he explained.
He is not alone. Other men might not admit it but it is common knowledge that men do not care much for shopping.
That’s thoroughly understandable.
It’s only human nature to shun activities one is not good at.
Psychologists have long speculated that differences in how the two genders view colours can be traced way back to the days, where Daddy hunted sabre-toothed tigers for meat while Mummy collected fruits and other vegetable goodies for the dinner table.
And here’s what Dr Anya Hurlbert and Dr Yazhu Ling of Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, found in 2007.
The two researchers flashed coloured patches on a computer screen for some 180 men and women of British and Chinese origin, all in the early 20s.
Their findings reveal that men and women from the two groups did not differ in their colour preferences.
There was one striking exception.
British and Chinese women preferred reddish hues such as pink to greenish-blue ones. It was the opposite for men, who went for green and blue.
As most fruit are reddish in colour, the researchers suggested that a preference for red, pink, and other bright hues could greatly benefit those who gather such fruits.
Could this be the reason why men are so lost in a shopping environment?
Yes, but there’s more.
Dr Joshua New of Yale University discovered that men can’t navigate shopping aisles. He wanted to test his hypothesis that women remember the location of food better than men do.
He gathered 41 women and 45 men and took them shopping. Each participant visited six of 90 food stalls in the market and were given a piece of food to eat. They were then led to the centre of the market.
When asked to point toward the particular stalls, one at a time, women were nearly 10 per cent more accurate than men at identifying each stall; and the further from the centre the worst the directions got.
It would be like a person ending up in Bishan Central instead of Toa Payoh Central after starting off in a straight line from the Raffles Town Club along Bukit Timah Road – which is about a three-kilometre miss by my reckoning.
Now, it’s common knowledge that men, generally, insist on taking the lead and often taking everyone else for a not so merry go round.
Yet, they continue to do.
Psychologists should now ascertain if women deliberately allow men to believe that their navigational skills are superior just to flatter the male ego.
Those findings would be an eye-opener.