Social preferences during childhood and the role of gender and age — An experiment in Austria and Sweden

Martinsson, Peter; Nordblom, Katarina; Rützler, Daniela; Sutter, Matthias

doi:10.1016/j.econlet.2010.11.028

Cited by 53 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…They find that a concern for efficiency mainly develops among males throughout adolescence, which maps closely to the male-specific focus on efficiency in the representative group. Martinsson, Nordblom, Rützler, and Sutter (2011) also report a similar gender difference in concern for efficiency in a study of social preferences among children in Sweden and Austria.…”

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confidence: 81%

Social Preferences in the Lab: A Comparison of Students and a Representative Population

Cappelen

Nygaard

Sørensen

et al. 2015

Scandinavian J Economics

102

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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. Can lab experiments on student populations serve to identify the motivational forces present in society at large? We address this question by conducting, to our knowledge, the first study of social preferences that brings a nationally representative population into the lab, and we compare their behavior to the behavior of different student populations. Our study shows that students may not be informative of the role of social preferences in the broader population. We find that the representative participants differ fundamentally from students both in their level of selfishness and in the relative importance assigned to different moral motives. It is also interesting to note that while we do not find any substantial gender differences among the students, males and females in the representative group differ fundamentally in their moral motivation. Terms of use: Documents inJEL-Code: C910.

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confidence: 81%

Social Preferences in the Lab: A Comparison of Students and a Representative Population

Cappelen

Nygaard

Sørensen

et al. 2015

Scandinavian J Economics

102

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The trade-off between equity and efficiency is usually measured using the distribution experiments in which a decision maker has to decide between a choice that minimizes inequity among participants and a choice that maximizes the sum of the payoff of all participants (Almås, Cappelen, Sørensen & Tungodden, 2010;Fehr, Glätze-Rützler & Sutter, 2013;Martinsson, Nordblom, Rützler & Sutter, 2011;Meuwese, Crone, de Rooij & Güroğlu, 2015;Capraro & Rand, 2018). The details can vary: the payoff of the decision-maker may or may not be affected by their action; in other situation, and efficiency may or may not harm one of the participants.…”

Section: Trade-off Gamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Dual-Process Approach to Human Sociality: A Review

Capraro¹

2019

SSRN Journal

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Which social decisions are intuitive? Which are deliberative? The dual-process approach to human sociality has emerged in the last decades as a vibrant and exciting area of research. Here, I review the existing literature on the cognitive basis of cooperation, altruism, honesty, equity-efficiency, positive and negative reciprocity, and moral judgments. For each of these domains, I list a number of open problems that I believe to be crucial to further advance our understanding of human social cognition. I conclude by making an attempt to introduce a game-theoretical framework to organize the existing empirical evidence. This framework seems promising, as it turns out to make predictions that are generally in line with the experimental data in all but one domain: positive reciprocity. I tried to keep the review selfcontained, exhaustive, and research-oriented. My hope is that it can contribute to bring further attention to this fascinating area of research.

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“…The starting point of this literature is the observation that children develop preferences for equity quite early in their lives (Blake & McAuliffe, 2011;Shaw & Olson, 2012), but adults seem to prefer efficiency over equity (Charness & Rabin, 2002;Engelmann & Strobel, 2004;Capraro, Smyth, Mylona & Niblo, 2014). In agreement with this view, several authors have observed a decrease in equity preferences accompanied by an increase in efficiency considerations from 8 to 19 years old (Almås, Cappelen, Sørensen & Tungodden, 2010;Fehr, Glätze-Rützler & Sutter, 2013;Martinsson, Nordblom, Rützler & Sutter, 2011;Meuwese, Crone, de Rooij & Güroğlu, 2015). Interestingly, this increase in efficiency considerations from childhood to adolescence appears to be stronger for boys than for girls (Almås et al, 2010;Meuwese et al, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Gender Differences in the Equity-Efficiency Trade-Off

Capraro¹

2019

SSRN Journal

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Gender differences in human behaviour have attracted generations of social scientists, who have explored whether males and females act differently in domains involving competition, risk taking, cooperation, altruism, honesty, as well as many others. Yet, little is known about gender differences in the equity-efficiency trade-off. It has been suggested that females are more equitable than males, but the empirical evidence is weak and inconclusive. This gap is particularly important, because people in power of redistributing resources often face a conflict between equity and efficiency, to the point that this trade-off has been named as "the central problem in distributive justice". The recently introduced Trade-Off Game (TOG) -in which a decision-maker has to unilaterally choose between being equitable or being efficient -offers a unique opportunity to fill this gap. To this end, I analyse gender differences on a large dataset including all N=5,056 TOG decisions collected by my research group since we introduced this game. The results show that females prefer equity over efficiency to a greater extent than males do. These findings suggest that males and females have different preferences for resource distribution, and point to new avenues for future research.

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Social preferences during childhood and the role of gender and age — An experiment in Austria and Sweden

Abstract: Abstract:We examine social preferences of Swedish and Austrian children and adolescents using the experimental design of Charness and Rabin (2002). We find that difference aversion decreases while social-welfare preferences increase with age.

Cited by 53 publications

References 11 publications

Social Preferences in the Lab: A Comparison of Students and a Representative Population

Social Preferences in the Lab: A Comparison of Students and a Representative Population

The Dual-Process Approach to Human Sociality: A Review

Gender Differences in the Equity-Efficiency Trade-Off

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