Social heuristics and social roles: Intuition favors altruism for women but not for men.

Abstract

Are humans intuitively altruistic, or does altruism require self-control? A theory of social heuristics, whereby intuitive responses favor typically successful behaviors, suggests that the answer may depend on who you are. In particular, evidence suggests that women are expected to behave altruistically, and are punished for failing to be altruistic, to a much greater extent than men. Thus, women (but not men) may internalize altruism as their intuitive response. Indeed, a meta-analysis of 13 new experiments and 9 experiments from other groups found that promoting intuition relative to deliberation increased giving in a Dictator Game among women, but not among men (Study 1, N = 4,366). Furthermore, this effect was shown to be moderated by explicit sex role identification (Study 2, N = 1,831): the more women described themselves using traditionally masculine attributes (e.g., dominance, independence) relative to traditionally feminine attributes (e.g., warmth, tenderness), the more deliberation reduced their altruism. Our findings shed light on the connection between gender and altruism, and highlight the importance of social heuristics in human prosociality.

Who Lies? A Meta-Analysis of the Effect of Sex, Age, and Education on Honesty

“…Since the dice is rolled privately, researchers cannot detect whether a given participant has lied or not. The only thing the researcher can do is to compare the distribution of reported outcomes with the random distribution, in order to deduce whether a significant 2 Previous research has mainly focus on the effect of demographic characteristics on social preferences (Bolton & Katok, 1995;Eckel & Grossman, 1998;Andreoni & Vesterlund, 2001;Fong, 2001;List, 2004;Dufwenberg & Muren, 2006;Houser and Schunk, 2006;Niederle and Vesterlund, 2007;Croson and Gneezy, 2009;Capraro, Jordan & Rand, 2014;Capraro & Marcelletti, 2014;Carlsson, Johansson-Stenman & Nam, 2014;Dreber et al, 2014;Capraro, 2015;Lin & Yu, 2015;Rieger & Mata, 2015;Brañas-Garza, Capraro & Rascón-Ramírez, 2016;Kettner & Waichman, 2016;Rand et al, 2016).…”

Deliberation erodes cooperative behavior — Even towards competitive out-groups, even when using a control condition, and even when eliminating selection bias

“…To encourage participants to make their decision intuitively or through deliberation, we drew on previous research and had participants make their decision under time pressure or time delay (Cone & Rand, 2014;Rand, Brescoll, Everett, Capraro, & Barcelo, 2016;Rand et al, 2012). Reducing the amount of time participants have to make their decision decreases the potential for deliberation to outweigh intuition, thus leading to more intuitive decisions (Wright, 1974).…”

Dual-Process Reasoning in Charitable Giving: Learning from Non-Results

“…For example, Kessler and Meier [13] find that the effect of cognitive load manipulations depends on whether the manipulation was implemented early or late in the experiment. 21 Second, manipulations may have different effects on different subgroups. This finding is consistent with that of Rand et al [21], who find that promoting intuition relative to deliberation increases giving among women, but not men, and argue that whether one is intuitively altruistic or selfish may depend on who you are.…”

“…21 Second, manipulations may have different effects on different subgroups. This finding is consistent with that of Rand et al [21], who find that promoting intuition relative to deliberation increases giving among women, but not men, and argue that whether one is intuitively altruistic or selfish may depend on who you are. The response to the treatments might depend on other characteristics such as education level or age, of which there was little variation in our study.…”

“…We do not find statistically-significant effects of our treatments on aggregate giving levels. In light of previously documented gender differences in response to intuitive and deliberative manipulations [21], we examine men and women separately and find that they have opposite responses to both manipulations. Re-evaluating our results for women, whose response to the treatment hewed most closely to our expectations, we still find no support for dual-process decision-making.…”