Gender Differences in Altruism: Expectations, Actual Behaviour and Accuracy of Beliefs

By Pablo Brañas-Garza, Valerio Capraro, Ericka Rasc'on-Ram'irez. 2016

199 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Previous research shows that women are more altruistic than men in dictator game experiments. Yet, little is known whether women are expected to be more altruistic than men. Here we elicit third-parties' beliefs about dictators' donations conditional on knowing the gender of the dictator. Our data provide evidence of four main findings: (i) framing instructions with gender does not affect expectations; (ii) women are expected to be more altruistic than men; (iii) both men and women have correct beliefs about the level of altruism among men; and (iv) both men and women overestimate the level of altruism among women. In doing so, our results uncover a perception gap according to which, although women are more altruistic than men, they are expected to be even more altruistic than they actually are.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ed9054b1f8fc525889d66cff7ef464d6f8b08283