Prosocial behavior and gender
This study revisits different experimental data sets that explore social behavior in economic games and uncovers that many treatment effects may be gender-specific. In general, men and women do not differ in "neutral" baselines. However, we find that social framing tends to reinforce proso...
| Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | article |
| Publication Date: | 2015 |
| Country: | España |
| Institution: | Universidad del País Vasco |
| Repository: | Addi. Archivo Digital para la Docencia y la Investigación |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:addi.ehu.eus:10810/18110 |
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10810/18110 |
| Access Level: | Open access |
| Keyword: | gender prosocial behavior treatment effects economic games altruism other-regarding behavior dictator games human brain sex-differences emotion regulation social distance children age connectivity preferences BEHAVIORAL NEUROSCIENCE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE |
| Summary: | This study revisits different experimental data sets that explore social behavior in economic games and uncovers that many treatment effects may be gender-specific. In general, men and women do not differ in "neutral" baselines. However, we find that social framing tends to reinforce prosocial behavior in women but not men, whereas encouraging reflection decreases the prosociality of males but not females. The treatment effects are sometimes statistically different across genders and sometimes not but never go in the opposite direction. These findings suggest that (i) the social behavior of both sexes is malleable but each gender responds to different aspects of the social context; and (ii) gender differences observed in some studies might be the result of particular features of the experimental design. Our results contribute to the literature on prosocial behavior and may improve our understanding of the origins of human prosociality. We discuss the possible link between the observed differential treatment effects across genders and the differing male and female brain network connectivity, documented in recent neural studies. |
|---|