Men tend to slow down by about 7 percent when walking with romantic partners, says a team of scientists from Seattle Pacific University, the United States.
Men walk at a slower pace to match the females’ paces only when the female is their romantic partner. Image credit: Virginia Commonwealth University.
People have an optimal walking speed that minimizes energy expenditure. This optimal speed varies with physical features like mass and lower limb length, and therefore males in any given population tend to have faster optimal walking speeds than females.
Given this difference, it is not clear what happens in walking groups of mixed-sex. In order to walk together, someone in the pair will need to pay the energetic cost of deviating from his or her optimal speed.
The study, reported in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, has examined speed choices when people walk around a track alone, with a significant other and with friends of the same and opposite sex.
The findings show that males walk at a significantly slower pace to match the females’ paces, only when the female is their romantic partner.
The paces of friends of either same or mixed sex walking together do not significantly change, suggesting that significant pace adjustments occur only for romantic partners.
According to the scientists, the results could have implications for both mobility and reproductive strategies of groups, and could help interpret fossil footprint trails and hunter gatherer strategies.
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Bibliographic information: Wagnild J, Wall-Scheffler CM. 2013. Energetic Consequences of Human Sociality: Walking Speed Choices among Friendly Dyads. PLoS ONE 8 (10): e76576; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0076576
