Sternadori, M. M., & Wise, K. (2010). Men and women read news differently. Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications, 22(1), 14-25.

Sternadori, M.;Wise, K.

2010

Sternadori, M. M., & Wise, K. (2010). Men and women read news differently. Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications, 22(1), 14-25.

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This study explored how the structure of written news affects men and women differently in terms of cognition. In a 2 (Structure) x 2 (Story) x 2 (Sex) mixed design, participants read two inverted pyramid and two chronological news stories, each on a different topic. Dependent measures included secondary task reaction times (STRTs), cued recall, recognition accuracy, and text comprehension. Women had slower reaction times than men across stories, but a significant interaction showed their use of cognitive resources was less affected by variations in story structure. These results are discussed in the context of a comprehensibility interpretation of the STRT measure. The findings suggest that the common use of the inverted pyramid structure, which has been criticized as difficult to comprehend, may not explain the decrease in female news readers.

This study found significant interactions between sex and story structure for STRTs and a significant interaction for cognitive capacity usage. Women had slower STRTs than men. However there were no significant interactions in the recognition, cued recall and text comprehension datasets.

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