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Comment by arandomusername | Hacker News Reader

Firstly, I have no doubt that women are a lot more vulnerable at night.

That said, I don't think this "study" is fair.

> asked them to click on areas in the photo that caught their attention

I too, would click on whatever is lit up in the centre, but when actually walking at night I constantly watch my surroundings, as anyone probably does that didn't grow up a sheltered life or in a super safe area.

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Their point is women largely WEREN'T clicking in the lit up center, even though the men were. Your counter only presumes that men would look more like the women's clicking in real life, but you havent explained the observable difference in clicking behaviors by posing that, it's a different question.

My point is that clicking on an image is not representative of what they would look at when actually walking through the area.

There is a pretty good argument to be made that asking someone to imagine walking in these scenes and click on areas of interest/concern is at least a partial proxy for where they will actually look when placed in that context. It is not reasonable to wholesale dismiss studies and their results simply because you think they could have operationalized their hypothesis differently or better. These undergrads did a pretty respectable job within the scientific resources at their disposal, and have presented a real result; now science must grapple with what that result is telling us and why these differences occurred. Moreover, one could argue that to your point, if clicking is not actually looking then why is there a difference at all? It's just clicking on a picture right?

It could be that men rely more on peripheral vision to identify threats on the side possibly?

An interesting off the cuff alternative hypothesis that could be tested in a future study for sure. Though if I were the authors before I did that study I would do a pretty big lit review of gender differences in foveal vs peripheral visual engagement. Is there any evidence that men might use their peripheral vision differently from women in the first place? (This is just a thought exercise, I don't have an answer and am not asking for one)

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