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The Effect of Gender on Response Time Essay

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I. Introduction Since the last decade of nineteenth century, there have been many experiments and approaches that were conducted to analyze which group men or women had a faster response reaction. Those experiments were about human response time which is the time needed to perceive, evaluate and respond to a particular question, or to identify the object, color. Sometimes, the response time also shows how smart people are, or how much information and knowledge they have. Franciscus Donders was the first scientist to analyze human response time. He tried to convince everybody that men and women had different response times (Donders, 1969). Zajdel (2007) also performed the same experiment and concluded that men reacted faster than …show more content…

Based on the information, this experiment is about recognition reaction. According to the types of reaction times, there are many factors that may affect reaction time such as gender, age, race, right vs. left hand, vision, types of stimuli, stimulus intensity, number of stimuli, practice and error, finger tremors, breathing cycle, disease, sobriety, experience, health, personality, timing available, and body temperature. Among those factors, gender is known as the common factor for many scientists and researchers use in their experiment. They want to know which group of people responds faster. There are many different features between men and women even though men they have no difference in the brain’s structure or cognitive abilities. They are very different in many other aspects such as: the toys they play with, the clothes wear, or the colors they like. Men focus on the problem more than women do, or men want to do it better than women such as push harder, jump higher (Deary, 2006). Therefore, there may be an expectation about the difference between men and women in response time. Based on the measurement, Zajdel and Nowak (2007) state that in response to all stimuli there is statistically significantly shorter reaction time in men than in women. Thus I decide to test the rate of men’s vs. women’s reaction time. The recording time will tell me which the faster group of people is. My hypothesis is that there is a significant difference between men and

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