this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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I’m not buying that heatmap data. Why are almost all the dots on the left red? That would mean that women pick a random spot and focus on that for an extended period of time before moving on to the next. This is not really how you’d investigate a scene. The right images are much more believable to me: Short glances at random points to get an overview of the scene and then re-investigating points of interest.
I am a man, though. Women: Do you really stare random points into oblivion?
Edit:
Ok, at first I thought this was actual eye tracking information. However,
Then the different-colored dots make even less sense. And why are there fringes?
Considering how common and easy eye tracking is, this seems like some shitty science.
whaaaat surely BYU, the school that claimed to have done cold fusion, is an upstanding pillar of academic research
i hate defending byu, but wasn't that UofU?
UwU?
Nah, UwU was a community college back then
I recently watched a BobbyBrocolli video on it, the controversy mostly surrounded UofU, a quick search shows that Pons and Fleischman are from UofU. The video also mentioned that BYU also claimed to discover cold fusion, but not the energy of the future self sustaining kind.
i must have missed ybu's announcement. no worries, there have been a lot of hoaxes in that area.
This would be the perfect use case for that fancy Apple VR headset they released a year or two so. Since it has built-in eye tracking, it would be easy to set up a test in a controlled environment where participants navigate it while looking around.
Navigating that scene in real life (or even simulated) would make the data orders of magnitude more annoying to interpret. On a static image you can just overlay all eye movements and produce a heatmap. But for a subject that’s actually (or virtually) moving, none of the data would coincide and you’d have to manually find out which focus points were actually equal.
Put the subject in an auto driving kart and make it go in same path for all of them
Sure, but any decent webcam and monitor can do this.
Shitty science at BYU? Surely not!
Study designed around a conclusion using a borderline invalid method.
I feel like utilizing eye tracking would be used if they were to study this concept more deeply. That data would be more complicated to sift through given how much data and how many variables might come into play. Definitely more telling but also harder to analyze.
How so?
https://sopuli.xyz/post/41573721/22043739
Thanks. But you can use eye tracking on static images with just a good webcam on a monitor.
Also in a live environment, presumed static (no people or traffic etc) image stabilization tech makes things much simpler.
Seems like a seriously flawed study, doezn't it, asking people to point to what's interesting is NOT AT ALL the same as tracking their eyes.
We could actually track their eye movement by using special glasses. Just call your study what it actually is, ffs... don't confuse the data.
...also, it has to do with attention on photos rather than real world going home experiences.
In the article they note that they participants were shown photos and told to click on areas that caught their attention. The results show that women paid more attention to the periphery. No eye tracking, no long focus.
they picked a location on campus widely known among the student body for people getting raped. i was warned as a freshman during orientation not to go there after dark.
Um. Holy shit. How does a known place on campus not get corrected immediately.
that's the neat thing! they expel the students who get raped, not the rapists. that way they can keep their crime statistics low.
As a woman, imagining situations like those: I can see the brightly lit center is empty, that's all I need to know about it. The stairs require several glances especially if I'm in heels or other unstable shoes. But those dark corners need checking and rechecking the whole time I'm walking, to be sure no tiny changes betray a lurker. Who is probably going to wait until they're at my back to make a move.
My mental image of the guys scanning the same image: "Yeah that's where I'm going, that's obviously where I'm looking." Sure, they could get mugged but it's less likely, and physical threat isn't on their mind.
This is completely untrue, men are (and always have been) the primary target of random violence such as mugging. According to FBI crime statistics it's hugely disproportional year after year. Women are disproportionately victimized by their intimate partners, both male and female. Both of these facts are beyond tragic but it is, in my opinion, really important to get these things straight. Women are more likely to scream for help when they are being robbed which leads them to being de-prioritized when violent criminals are choosing their targets. Men tend to submit, and are likely to avoid reporting it due to shame, so the disparity is probably significantly higher than the already gigantic reported disparity.
Hope you don't see this as me just trying to stir shit cause I'm not. It just really irks me to see that sentiment repeated even though it's entirely unsubstantiated. I'm a man of small stature and a minority. With awareness of the reality of the situation, the threat of physical violence is literally always on my mind. I've had a solid handful of random encounters in public that very nearly turned violent and it causes me pretty severe anxiety.
Don't know why I felt like typing a novel over this, like I said though I guess I just find it frustrating. I can't talk to my female friends about this, they just laugh at me. They talk about it like I'm wholly immune to violence by virtue of being male when it couldn't be further from the truth.
Edit with data from FBI crime data explorer: Over the last 10 years it's 906k male victims of robbery to 474k female victims, and (though it doesn't need to be said) that's just about double.
My point wasn’t that women aren’t looking at the surroundings, but that they don’t do it as is portrayed in the image. You said it yourself: “checking and rechecking the whole time” That doesn’t match singular hotspots, but rather a more spread-out heatmap with peaks at certain positions.
I was mugged in the playground of my building, the street across fine my house, my lobby, and at 57th and suttton, all in Manhattan. Then a few more times when I lived in Baltimore. I really hope most women don't get raped that often.
I hope you've started scanning the dark periphery like we do. Not because you deserved anything that happened to you! And I'm not assuming you weren't already. But because I can't do anything to protect you from over here on the Internet and I don't want that to happen to you anymore. It's when we're near home that we tend to let our guard down.
Thank you. I've taken a much more holistic approach. It's worked very well. Haven't been mugged in decades.
Can you mention some of the changes you've made? Maybe it would help someone who might read this comment chain.
Many of them likely aren't immediately useful to most people but here goes.
1 I got older, got a few degrees, got paid a bunch and have been living in areas with extremely low street crime. I could probably pass out in front of my house with a Benji sticking out of my fly and it would still be there in the morning.
2 I quit drinking. That wasn't an issue when I was a kid but later on it provided 2 huge benefits: 2.a) My situational awareness is never impaired. 2.b) It eliminated the vast majority of situations where someone might find me an interesting target.
3 I spent an absurd amount of time practicing and studying martial arts. The fighting parts of that aren't that useful but many RBSD (Reality Based Self Defense) classes are actually practical. tl;dr It's now fairly easy to find actual statistics on many forms of violence, look up the most likely ones for you, find the proven counters and practice those. For example, I've done a ton of drills that are a variation of shoving an attacker, yelling "Get away from me you PERVERT" (because while people tend to ignore cries for help, everyone wants to know who the pervert is), and running away.
4 Closely related to 3 is the general realization that you don't need to make yourself immune to violence. It's hard to be a good fighter and it's hard to make yourself the least attractive target. It's pretty easy to avoid being the most attractive target. For example, men are often targeted by men who want to exert dominance. Looking tough is counter productive because the attacker gets more glory from taking down a tough guy than a wimp. Looking batshit crazy is pretty effective; if I feel like I'm being followed and there isn't a convenient escape I smack my head a few times and start arguing with "the voices".
It's probably 1 click = blue, right? The more clicks overlap at a certain point the closer to red.
And all women telepathically agreed on which exact pixels to click?
Theres probably variation from the background there, that drives clicks to that particular spot. Several of the red-female locations have blue-male dots at the same spot.
Isn't it like a video game, where you look to where people might be hiding?
Yeah, what this data actually shows is that, in the situations tested, women tend to find darker areas of a picture more interesting and men tend to find lighter areas more interesting. Not as interesting of a headline though. I'm interested to see what the actual paper says, not some click bait pop-sci meme.
To your edit: The dots do make sense.
This is an overlay of every participant. So if 100 women clicked in the same 10 places, for instance, they would be red. While places 50 women clicked would be yellow.
Also, even if this was eye tracking of one person, it could still make sense. Red != 100%. Red is the place where the most time was spent looking. So of 1s was spent on all the dots, and everywhere else was less than 1s, then red. Comparing it to the male chart is what makes it seem off, but the comparison of color doesn't matter, it's the math.
I think their question was why would all the women click the same ten random places rather than spread the heat map out more broadly along the dark area?
Exactly, thanks.
Ahh, that's more clear then, sorry!
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/vio.2023.0027
Basically:
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