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...

ver descrição completa

Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Espinosa Alejos, María Paz, Kovarik, Jaromir
Formato: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2015
País:España
Recursos:Universidad del País Vasco
Repositorio:Addi. Archivo Digital para la Docencia y la Investigación
OAI Identifier:oai:addi.ehu.eus:10810/18110
Acesso em linha:http://hdl.handle.net/10810/18110
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave: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
Descrição
Resumo: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.