Eye-image as nonverbal social cue has asymmetric gender effects in dictator taking games

Subhasish Chowdhury, Joo Young Jeon and Bibhas Saha

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2023, vol. 107, issue C

Abstract: Dictator giving games often demonstrate that nonverbal social cues, such as drawn-in eyes on display, induce pro-social behavior in the form of giving more. Notably, sometimes this effect is seen to differ between males and females. However, the effects of social cues on negative behavior along with its gender dimension have not been studied in a controlled setting. We investigate this with a dictator taking game with and without an eye-image involving a gender balanced subject pool. We find that the eye-image affects the taking behavior of the males and females very differently. Males take significantly less, and females take significantly more in the presence of the eye-image, compared to a baseline. The two groups’ opposing effects cancel each other to produce no overall treatment effect. Furthermore, while with the eye-image males are less likely to act selfishly (i.e., to take the whole amount) and more likely to act as an egalitarian, the females exhibit the opposite behavior. We discuss possible reasons for this asymmetric gender effects.

Keywords: Dictator-game; Social Cue; Taking game; Gender (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D64 D84 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214804323001131
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:107:y:2023:i:c:s2214804323001131

DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2023.102087

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza

More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().