We analyze how subjects' self-assessment depends on whether its accuracy is observable to others. We find that women downgrade their selfassessment given observability while men do not. Women avoid the shame they may have if others observe that they overestimated themselves. Men, however, do not seem to be similarly shame-averse. This gender difference may be due to different societal expectations: While we find that men are expected to be overconfident, women are not. Shame-aversion may explain recent findings that women shy away from competition, demanding jobs and wage negotiations, as entering these situations is a statement to be confident of one's ability.
Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Psychological studies show that a vast majority of people thinks that their ability is above the average when they have to assess their position in a distribution of a target group.
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Documents inWe analyse in an experiment whether this is still true when people receive feedback on their relative abilities. Our main finding is that feedback influences agent's decisions and improves overall self-assessment.
Standard economic models have long been applied to choices over private consumption goods, but have recently been extended to incorporate social situations as well. We challenge the applicability of standard decision-theoretic models to social settings. In an experiment where choices affect the payoffs of someone else, we find that a large fraction of subjects prefer randomization over any of the deterministic outcomes. This tendency prevails whether the other party knows about the choice situation or not. Such randomization violates standard decision theory axioms that require that lotteries are never better than their best deterministic component. For conceptually similar choices in classical non-social situations, we do not find much evidence for such violations, suggesting the need for theories of uncertainty that are targeted to social settings.
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