Psychology research has shown that men and women usually remember things differently. For instance, women on average are better at recalling emotional and social stimuli, whereas men are better at remembering episodes of violence and recognising artificial objects such as cars. The usual explanation is that men and women have different interests and motivations.
Now a study in Applied Cognitive Psychology has added to this literature by testing whether men and women differ in how much they remember of clips from rom-com movies and action films.
Across two experiments, the researchers Peter Wühr and Sascha Schwarz recruited hundreds of German men and 80 women, mainly students, to watch a thirty minute clip of a genre classic. In the first experiment, this was either Die Hard with a Vengeance’s cat-and-mouse game between terrorist and embattled everymen, or the will-they-won’t-they love affair of Notting Hill. The second experiment featured clips from German versions of the French romance Amelie or the action flick Gomez & Tavares.
After watching the film clip, participants answered questions about character attributes, storyline, visual details, events, and places – essentially a film trivia quiz – and said how much they liked the film. Men in both studies showed relatively better recall for the action movie than the romance, whereas women remembered more of the romantic comedy than the action film. The analysis controlled for previous familiarity with the film, so this didn’t appear to be driving the effect.
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Source material from BPS Research Digest