Trust and gender: An examination of behavior and beliefs in the Investment Game

How does gender influence trust, the likelihood of being trusted and the level of trustworthiness? We compare choices by men and women in the Investment Game and use questionnaire data to try to understand the motivations for the behavioral differences. We find that men trust more than women, and women are more trustworthy than men. The relationship between expected return and trusting behavior is stronger among men than women, suggesting that men view the interaction more strategically than women. Women felt more obligated both to trust and reciprocate, but the impact of obligation on behavior varies. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. The existence of gender differences in trust behavior (trusting others, being trusted by others and being trustworthy, i.e., rewarding trust through reciprocation) has important implications for economic behavior, yet broad empirical evidence from a variety of contexts that measure trust directly or indirectly in a number of different ways is mixed at best in terms of demonstrating which gender may be more trusting or trustworthy in an economic interaction and in suggesting the influence of a gender interaction (i.e., differing results when a male interacts with a male than with a female). Survey evidence on which gender is more trusting is similarly divided. A meta-analysis of scales from widely used personality inventories from 1940 to 1992 showed that females scored slightly but consistently higher on scales of trust (Feingold, 1994). These measures reflected a belief in the honesty and positive intentions of other individuals, as well as of experts, public officials, the media, and so on. On the other hand, studies have found that persons belonging to groups that historically have been discriminated against (e.g., minorities and women) were less likely to believe “most people can be trusted,” even when controlling for a host of demographic characteristics (Terrell and Barrett, 1979; Alesina and La Ferrara, 2002; Glaeser et al., 2000). Research in business has demonstrated that female consumers have greater trust concerns than men and are less likely to engage in purchasing over the web (Sheehan, 1999), yet in an empirical investigation in the accounting profession, male and female auditors were equally trusting of clients (Shaub, 1996). ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 802 656 0183; fax: +1 802 656 8405. E-mail address: Sara.Solnick@uvm.edu (S. Solnick). 0167-2681/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2007.10.006 N.R. Buchan et al. / Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 68 (2008) 466–476 467 Evidence as to the more trusted gender also is mixed. A study of psychological attitudes using Rotter’s interpersonal trust scale (1967), containing 40 items sampling a range of situations and potential groups that one might trust, revealed greater trust towards women than towards men (Wright and Sharp, 1979). In Shaub’s study of auditors, male clients were believed to be less trustworthy than female clients. Conventional wisdom also appears to consider women more trustworthy. For example, in Mexico City, government officials created all-female teams of traffic cops in the belief that female officers are less likely to take bribes (Treaster, 1999). Other international evidence indicates that women are less likely both to take bribes and to condone taking bribes and that corruption is less common in countries with greater female participation in public life (Swamy et al., 2001; Dollar et al., 2001). However, Jeanquart-Barone and Sekaran (1994) report that among female civil service employees, male supervisors were trusted more than female supervisors; in this study, trust was measured by three predictors: participation in decision making, gender discrimination, and the supervisor’s role as mentor. Additionally, in an experimental study in which participants could elect to receive a bribe, no significant gender differences were found (Frank and Schulze, 2000). Finally, the existence of a gender interaction on trusting and trustworthy behavior is unclear; very few studies have investigated interaction effects. This evidence highlights an ambiguous understanding of the role of gender on trust behavior and suggests that the measure of trust and trustworthiness used and the context in which it is measured may influence gender results. Furthermore, given that each of the works cited studied only one or two aspects of trust behavior (focusing only on which gender is more trusting, for example), we do not have a full picture of the extent of the influence of gender on trust and trustworthiness. We contribute to this literature by examining all facets of trust behavior (which gender is more trusting, more trusted, more trustworthy) in a single experimental setting, the Investment Game (Berg et al., 1995), capturing both main and interaction effects of gender. We employ this context because it is explicitly designed to measure trust and trustworthiness in an economic interaction. Additionally, we examine the issue both behaviorally (by looking at individuals’ behavior) and attitudinally (by examining their expectations and beliefs). This more comprehensive research approach will allow a broader understanding of the influence of gender on trust behavior and a deeper understanding of the psychological motivations for those differences. This study represents a middle ground between general attitudinal measures of trust (which may or may not correlate well with actual behavior) and behavior in the field (where endogeneity problems such as self-selection may bias the results). 1. Why would we expect gender effects on behavior in the Investment Game? The mixed set of results from the research discussed above suggests that the context of an interaction may influence whether gender effects are likely to arise. Research from psychology on social role theory suggests that the economic interaction captured in the Investment Game is a context ripe for the influence of gender. We believe that our exchange situation will prompt traditional gender role interpretations. The social role theory of gender differences suggests that differences in social behavior are an outgrowth of gender roles that dictate the behaviors that are appropriate for men and women (Eagly and Wood, 1991). The influence of gender roles on behavior is caused by two processes. In the first, the “expectancies associated with gender roles act as normative pressures that foster behaviors consistent with these gender-typical work roles” (Eagly, 1997, p. 1381). In the second, men and women acquire different skills and beliefs through their participation in gender-segregated roles throughout their lives, which influence their behavior. Social role theory emphasizes that males and females are differentiated along the agentic (instrumental, outcome-based) versus communal (procedural, process-based) continuum described by Bakan (1966), a proposition supported in a metaanalysis of gender differences in personality by Feingold. Specifically, the female gender role promotes communal behavior, and the male gender role promotes agentic (sometimes called instrumental or agency) behavior. Archer claims that “all aspects of men’s and women’s social behavior can be characterized as arising from their agency and communion” (Archer, 1996, p. 915). Manifestations of these agentic versus communal tendencies have been demonstrated in a large body of research. For example, in task-oriented small groups, men are more focused on the task whereas women tend to be more social (Anderson and Blanchard, 1982). Men are more aggressive in general (Eagly and Steffen, 1986), but women are more likely to attend to their partner in a social interaction, displaying more empathy (Ickes et al., 1986). Finally, women, more than men, emphasize equality and harmony in relationships (Cross and Markus, 1993). We propose that the two roles in our economic exchange will prompt different behaviors by men and women because of these differences in agentic (instrumental) and communal tendencies. We will attempt to tap into the expectations and beliefs of men and women in our experiment by asking them their expectations about the partner’s behavior and the degree to which they feel obligated to send or return money to the partner, then testing whether the impact of these expectations and obligations on behavior vary by gender. For those with instrumental motivations (men), we predict that expectations will have a stronger impact on behavior. For those with communal motivations (women), we predict that social obligations will have a stronger impact on behavior. Social role theory does not specify what will happen when the genders interact in an economic setting (e.g., when men play men vs. when men play women), and just as there is little and contrasting empirical evidence regarding this interaction effect, theories regarding it are few and yield contradictory propositions. For example, social identity theory from psychology suggests that in order to bolster their own identity and the identity of their particular group, males will be more trusting and trustworthy when paired with other males and females likewise with other females (Tajfel and Turner, 1979, and review 468 N.R. Buchan et al. / Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 68 (2008) 466–476 articles by Brewer, 1979; Messick and Mackie, 1989). On the other hand, expectation states theory, developed in sociology, suggests that gender is a status characteristic that may influence behavior in groups. Because females are generally considered to possess low status relative to males, females may try to elevate their status by displaying high levels of trust and trustworthy behavior to men, relative to the levels they display toward women (Sell, 1997; Ridgeway, 1982). Because of the disparate nature both of empirical evidence and grounded theory regarding the gender interaction, we