Gender differences in problem-solving may be linked to people-pleasing behaviour: Study

Girls may be likelier than boys to follow teachers’ instructions even when those instructions are incorrect, while boys are more inclined to explore their own solutions – a tendency that could be linked to gender differences in people-pleasing behaviour, according to research by University of Toronto psychologists.

For the study, researchers from U of T’s Toronto Early Cognition Lab (TECL) evaluated how children aged seven to 10 responded to inaccurate teaching across an array of tasks.

The findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, showed girls were more persistent in following taught solutions across masculine- and feminine-stereotyped tasks – and that people-pleasing may have played a role in shaping this gender difference. 

The study's lead author Mia Radovanovic, a PhD candidate in the department of psychology in the Faculty of Arts & Science, says the results don't mean that boys are better problem-solvers than girls, but rather, that boys are using different strategies in search of answers – and these strategies may be more helpful in some contexts than others. “Listening to the instructor and persisting with the taught solution serves you well in school, which may explain why we see girls outperforming boys in academics and more women than men with university degrees,” Radovanovic says.

“Success in the workplace, however, requires championing your own ideas – a behaviour we not only are less likely to encourage girls to develop at a young age, but are more likely to punish women for displaying at work.”

For the study, Radovanovic and her doctoral supervisor Jessica Sommerville, professor in the department of psychology and principal investigator at TECL, tested the seven-to-10-year-old participants in a number of scenarios.

For example, in one experiment, a teacher showed students how to complete a video game obstacle course by jumping from a specific platform – which participants would eventually realize was missing.

When the teacher's instructions didn’t result in success, the children began approaching the tasks differently. On average, girls persisted with the instructions despite evidence that the solution was incorrect, while boys were more likely to search for alternatives such as having their players climb down and investigate the surrounding area for other routes to complete the game.

To understand whether the differing responses to the tasks were linked to differences in people-pleasing, the researchers had participants answer a questionnaire to measure their concern for what others think, dependency on others to satisfy their needs and degree to which they sought to please others by prioritizing their opinions and desires.

Overall, girls scored higher in people-pleasing than boys, particularly when it came to concern for maintaining positive relationships – which aligns with past research on adult populations.

Ultimately, prioritizing the teacher’s instructions over their own ideas created gender differences in success and learning, as girls were less likely to solve the problems presented in the different tasks. As a result, the researchers suggest that socializing girls to conform is linked to greater pressure for them to obey instructions and avoid upsetting authority (they note the study did not account for socio-economic factors, race or people who identify as non-binary, due to sample size limitations).

In order to ensure that girls benefit equally from learning opportunities, the researchers stress the importance of creating environments where they can explore and express their own ideas.

Encouraging children to push against the status quo in select situations where obedience isn’t crucial – like giving your child permission to dress however they want – could also help prevent people-pleasing from persisting into adulthood.

“We talk about what we can do to make women feel more empowered to advocate for themselves in their careers. But advice akin to [former Meta chief operating officer] Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In can only be so effective when the social conditioning for girls to conform takes root at such a young age,” says Radovanovic.

She adds it’s important for children to develop the foundational skill of exploring beyond what they’re taught, so that they can more critically assess the information they receive – which can have implications when they encounter misinformation.

“We as teachers, parents and mentors must intervene early on and tell our kids: ‘I don't always know the right answer, and it would be cool to see what you think.’”