Gender and culture: do they matter for norms?

ABSTRACT

In a natural experiment, we observed that the influence of a norm depended upon the gender and cultural background of participants. Both gender and cultural background contributed to the effect of peer pressure that partly controlled against the act of cheating among participants as they completed a group task. Furthermore, both factors served to describe the characteristics of hardworking individuals in the group. We therefore conclude that the effectiveness of a norm in a group is expected to depend upon the presence of hardworking individuals therein.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture
• gender
• norm
• peer effects

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C25
• D70
• Z10

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Mark Taylor and two anonymous reviewers as well as participants to SAE 2016 (Bilbao) for useful suggestions. We are also indebted to all the participants of this experiment for seriously engaging in the requested task. Any errors are our own responsibility. Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER (EU) projects ECO2014-52506R and ECO2014-52999-R, and from Generalitat de Catalunya projects 2014SGR327 and 2014SGR1326, XREA and XREPP is gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Bonouri and Echel (2012) have argued that experiments rank among the most suitable ways of disentangling the relationship of cultural attributes and individual behaviour. More recently, Bohnet (2016) has made the same argument in relation to evaluating the impact of gender.

² We cite Coleman’s view (1990), which holds that a norm is an action subject to the authority of others, meaning that control of the action is not exercised by one individual, but by all individuals involved in the action.

³ In complement, Barr and Serra (2010) have concluded that individuals whose culture involves corruption carry their attitudes about corruption across borders.

⁴ Instead, countries with a higher percentage of Protestants exhibit lower levels of corruption (Treisman 2000).

⁵ That is, all members of the group contributed the same percentage of work to the project.

⁶ Other nationalities most represented in the sample were German (13.55%), Polish (4.67%), Portuguese (4.40%), Danish (3.74%), Italian (2.34%), and French (1.87).

Additional information

Funding

Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness projects ECO2014-52506-R and ECO2014-52999-R, and from Generalitat de Catalunya projects 2014SGR327 and 2014SGR1326, XREAP and XREPP -Fundació Bosch i Gimpera is gratefully acknowledged.