We explore gender attitudes towards competition in the United Arab Emirates -a traditionally patriarchal society which in recent times has adopted numerous policies to empower women and promote their role in the labor force. The experimental treatments vary whether individuals compete in single-sex or mixed-sex groups. In contrast to previous studies, women in our sample are not less willing to compete than men. In fact, once we control for individual performance, Emirati women are more likely to select into competition. Our analysis shows that neither women nor men shy away from competition, and both compete more than what would be optimal in monetary terms as the fraction of men in their group increases. We offer a detailed survey of the literature and discuss possible reasons for the lack of gender differences in our experiment.

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The degree of altruistic behavior among strangers is an evolutionary puzzle. A prominent explanation is the evolutionary legacy hypothesis according to which an evolved reciprocity-based psychology affects behavior even when reciprocity is impossible, i.e., altruistic behavior in such instances is maladaptive. Empirical support for this explanation comes from laboratory experiments showing that surveillance cues, e.g., photographs of watching eyes, increase altruistic behavior. A competing interpretation for this evidence, however, is that the cues signal the experimenter’s expectations and participants, aware of being monitored, intentionally behave more altruistically to boost their reputation. Here we report the first results from a field experiment on the topic in which participants are unaware they are being monitored and reciprocity is precluded. The experiment investigates the impact of surveillance cues on a textbook example of altruistic behavior—hand hygiene prior to treating a ‘patient’. We find no evidence surveillance cues affect hand hygiene, despite using different measures of hand-hygiene quality and cues that have been previously shown to be effective. We argue that surveillance cues may have an effect only when participants have reasons to believe they are actually monitored. Thus they cannot support claims altruistic behavior between strangers is maladaptive.

This paper presents evidence from a lab experiment investigating whether the preeminence of conditional cooperators in studies using the method of Fischbacher, Gächter and Fehr (2001, Economics Letters) is sensitive to changes in the experimental frame. The treatments vary the framing such that the salience of conditionality to subjects is reduced. The results show that these manipulations affect the distribution of elicited types. However, there is no evidence that the framing of Fischbacher et al. overestimates the fraction of conditional cooperators compared to the other frames considered in the experiment. Furthermore, this research finds that conditional contributions elicited using the Fischbacher et al. (2001) frame are the most consistent with contributions in a one-shot public good game.