Editor's note: This article was originally published in The Surveyor, YouGov America's weekly email newsletter. It has been revised for publication here. Subscribe to The Surveyor for regular updates on YouGov's polling.
Most Americans say they're pretty good at getting around, even without GPS. More older Americans say they're good at navigating than do younger ones. More men say they've got good navigational skills than do women. And people in relationships are more likely to say they're better at navigating than to say that their partners are.
YouGov polled 1,181 U.S. adult citizens about their sense of direction and navigational skills. The big picture is perhaps encouraging, at least about navigational self-regard: More than half of Americans say they're either good (37%) or excellent (16%) at navigating without GPS. Another 27% say they're fair, and 17% say they're either poor (10%) or terrible (7%).
Men and Americans 45 or older are more likely to say they're excellent or good at navigating without GPS than are women or adults under 45. College graduates are slightly more likely to say they're good at navigating than are people without a college degree, but the difference by education is smaller than the difference by age or gender. (All groups — men, women, younger, and older Americans, people with and without college degrees — are more likely to say they're good at navigating than that they're bad at it; the difference is in the extent to which they're more likely.)
Americans who spend lots of time looking at maps are more likely to say they're good at navigating than those who seldom or never look at maps. Among the 9% of Americans who look at maps daily, 36% say they're excellent at navigating without GPS directions. Among the 7% who never look at maps, only 10% say they're excellent navigators.
YouGov also asked Americans questions from the Santa Barbara Sense-of-Direction Scale, originally published in 2002 by a team led by Professor Mary Hegarty of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Around half of the questions are structured so that agreeing reflects an opinion of better navigational abilities, such as "I am very good at reading maps." The rest are reversed, so agreeing reflects claiming a worse sense of direction, such as "I very easily get lost in a new city."
On all 15 questions, Americans 45 or older are more likely to indicate better skill with directions than are younger adults.
Note that there are many young people who view themselves as having good senses of direction, and many old people who say they have bad senses of direction. These results merely reflect broad tendencies. They also only capture self-reported senses of direction, rather than testing ability.
Even more dramatic than the age splits are the gender splits — which are subject to the same caveats. Men are consistently more likely than women to say they're good at directions. For example, 73% of men and 53% of women strongly or somewhat agree that "I can usually remember a new route after I have only traveled it once." 61% of men and 36% of women say they tend to think in terms of cardinal directions. 25% of men and 51% of women agree that they "usually let someone else do the navigational planning for long trips."
YouGov asked people to rate their partners' navigational abilities as well as their own. We then compared how they rated their own abilities and their partner's, and categorized them by whether they thought they were more skilled at navigating than their partner, equally skilled, or less skilled.
Our sample size wasn't large enough to report on same-sex relationships, but looking just at people who identify as heterosexual and are in relationships, 38% say they're more skilled at navigating than their partner, 35% say they're equally skilled, and 27% say they're less skilled.
The fact that more people say they are better at navigating than say their partner is implies mismatched perceptions — possibly in part because of self-aggrandizement.
Couples show a sizable gender split in line with the broader gender split: Among heterosexual people in relationships, men are more likely than women to say they're better navigators. Among heterosexual men in relationships, 55% say they're better at navigating than their partners, and just 7% say their partner is better. Among heterosexual women in relationships, 20% say they're better at navigating, and 47% say their partner is better.
Methodology: The poll was conducted among 1,181 U.S. adult citizens. Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of U.S. adult citizens. A random sample (stratified by gender, age, race, education, geographic region, and voter registration) was selected from the 2019 American Community Survey. The sample was weighted according to gender, age, race, education, 2024 presidential vote, 2020 election turnout and presidential vote, baseline party identification, and current voter registration status. 2024 presidential vote, at time of weighting, was estimated to be 48% Harris and 50% Trump. Demographic weighting targets come from the 2019 American Community Survey. Baseline party identification is the respondent’s most recent answer given around November 8, 2024, and is weighted to the estimated distribution at that time (31% Democratic, 32% Republican). The margin of error for the overall sample is approximately 4%.
Image: Getty (Maria_Castellanos)
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