RECONSTRUCTING THE DATES OF PERSONAL EVENTS - GENDER DIFFERENCES IN ACCURACY

One commonly held stereotype is that females are more concerned with, and attentive to, dates than are males. One possible implication of this idea is that females have a more welldeveloped temporal reference schema than males, which should allow females to reconstruct the dates on which past events have occurred with more accuracy than males. This accuracy hypothesis was assessed by re‐analysing the data from four studies collected in previous work on the accuracy of event dating. Analyses of two of the studies yielded evidence for more accurate female dating; analysis of a third study produced a substantial, but non‐significant, trend in the predicted direction; and analysis of the fourth study yielded a small, but nonsignificant, reversal. A meta‐analysis combining the results of these four studies indicated that the dating accuracy of females was superior to the dating accuracy of males. Additional analyses indicated that these differences were probably not due to differences in self‐disclosure patterns. Copyright © 1990 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd