The way we walk gives us a hint of how our hearts talk. This may be true for men as a new study concluded that men tend to walk at a slower pace when walking with a female who is of a romantic interest, compared to strolling with someone who is not the apple of his eyes. When walking with other male friends, the dudes tend to race.
Women on the other hand do not vary their pace when walking with their special someone or with another male friend. However, they tend to walk slower when walking with another female.
A study published on the online journal PLOS ONE established that men who walk solo walk faster, but men eased the pace of walking when ambling with their girlfriends or wives. Males try to match the speeds of their partners. The research looked into the walking speeds of heterosexual couples and some of their friends.
The small study invited 11 couples with some of their friends representing both genders. The subjects were asked to walk around a track several times. They were asked to walked alone and in different pairings. There were a total of 36 people who participated in the study with ages averaging between 18 and 29.
Generally, women walked slower than men. The female subjects walked on an average speed of 1.44 meters per second while men were slightly faster at 1.53 meters per second. The most likely reason for this is the taller male subjects with longer legs compared to their female counterparts. When the couples were asked to walk together, the male subjects slowed down regardless if they were holding hands or not.
"It's really men who do all the compromising," said biologist Cara Wall-Scheffler from the Seattle Pacific University in an interview.
Wall-Scheffler theorizes that the male were following their evolutionary behavior. As hunters, the males and females went as a group but the males do not push the females to walk faster than usual or over-exert during the activity so as not to affect their fertility.
From a psychological perspective, the researcher also sees the male subjects slowing down to be more intimate with the females on a "shoulder-bumping-hip-bumping" basis.
