Do Women Comply More than Men? Experimental Evidence from a General Population Sample

Müge Süer, Nicola Cerutti, Jana Friedrichsen and Gyula Seres

No 11593, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Women are often perceived as more compliant than men; however, the literature provides inconclusive evidence. Using a novel experimental design comprising two complementary experiments, we test this claim in online samples representative of the German adult population. The first experiment (N=1600) features a probabilistic social dilemma game (PDG) in which participants can increase their individual payoff at the expense of exposing themselves and their group to probabilistic losses. In two treatment conditions, they receive either a recommendation on socially optimal behavior or a recommendation and information on weakly non-compliant peer behavior. We find that the recommendation strongly affects behavior but more so for women than for men. However, information on the non-compliant behavior of others does not induce significantly different responses in men and women. In the second experiment (N=522), we elicit empirical and normative expectations about behavior in the PDG with a recommendation to study the role of norms in following it. While men and women are expected to hold similar normative beliefs, men are expected to follow the recommendation less often, suggesting that compliance is a female social norm.

Keywords: compliance; public good; social dilemma; gender; risk-taking; social norms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D81 H41 I12 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-soc
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11593

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