Gender differences in social interactions

Guido Friebel, Marie Lalanne, Bernard Richter, Paul Seabright and Peter Schwardmann
Additional contact information
Paul Seabright: TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - UT - Université de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: We study how the random assignment of new students to introductory-week groups shapes subsequent friendship networks. Both women and men report being much more likely to be friends with same-gender students with whom they were (randomly) assigned in a group during their first week on campus, and the effect is much stronger for women. When students from the same cohort play a repeated trust game in the experimental laboratory, their behavior helps explain what we observed in the field. Women display more stability and less flexibility than men in their interactions with individuals with whom they had previously played. This difference is enough to generate homophily in the observational data even though subjects show no intrinsic preference for same-gender interaction.

Keywords: Social networks; Gender differences; Trust game (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2021, 186, pp.33-45. ⟨10.1016/j.jebo.2021.03.016⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Gender differences in social interactions (2021)
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:hal:journl:hal-03231079

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2021.03.016

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().