Gender differences in trust and reciprocity: evidence from a large-scale experiment with heterogeneous subjects

Abstract

This article examines gender differences in an experimental trust game. Recent studies have shown that men trust more and that women are more reciprocal in laboratory experiments. Participants in these studies, however, are typically university students who may not be representative of the entire population. In this study, we use data from a large-scale experiment with heterogeneous subjects who are representative of the German population. We find that men exhibit not only more trusting behaviour, but also more reciprocating behaviour than women. Moreover, our results are indicative of age-dependent gender differences. For men, we find an inverse U-shaped relationship between age, on the one hand, and both trust and reciprocity, on the other; however, we do not find age effects for women.

Keywords:

• trust
• reciprocity
• gender differences
• large-scale experiments
• heterogeneous subjects

JEL Classification:

• C72
• C90
• J16

Acknowledgement

We thank two anonymous referees for very helpful comments.

Notes

¹ Moreover, a considerable number of experimental studies report systematic gender differences in time preferences (Dittrich and Leipold, 2014), risk preferences (Croson and Gneezy, 2009) and bargaining behaviour (Dittrich et al., 2014). Studies using dictator games show that women are more inequality averse and less selfish than men (Eckel and Grossman, 1996, 1998).

² It should be mentioned that, although the sample is drawn from the German population, the study was conducted in a so-called WEIRD country (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic), which limits the general heterogeneity of the data (Henrich et al., 2010).

³ The behaviour of the proposer may moreover be motivated by other-regarding preferences, such as altruism. Also the responder’s reciprocal behaviour may be driven not only by conditional kindness, but also by unconditional kindness motivated by altruism (Cox, 2004).

⁴ Appendix A contains translated versions of the experimental instructions.

⁵ In laboratory experiments, the amount sent by the proposer is usually tripled by the experimenter. The responder thus receives three times the amount offered by the proposer and decides on directly sending back any amount to the proposer. This direct-response method, however, is difficult to implement in our online experiment. Brandts and Charness (2011) review experimental evidence and report that the strategy method induces results similar to those induced by the direct-response method.

⁶ The demographic data of the sample are similar to those of the German population on the basis of a comparison with the national-level census data.

⁷ The regression results of the extended model are presented in Table A1 in Appendix B.

⁸ The results are presented in Table A2 in Appendix C.

⁹ The regression results are presented in Table A3 in Appendix C.

¹⁰ The full regression results for men and women are presented in Tables A4 and A5 in Appendix C.