Earnings, emotional understanding and gender
Earnings, emotional understanding and gender
- March 28, 2016
- UCI economists study how well males and females understand emotions when paid
Friendly. Terrified. Playful. Annoyed.
When UCI researchers asked more than 200 college students to accurately identify human
emotions displayed in 36 different photos using only pictures of eyes as their guide,
women outperformed their male counterparts. However, when money was introduced as
an incentive for correct answers, the men stepped up their game and the females fell
short. Why?
“Well, men – much more than women – can be more extrinsically motivated when it comes
to paying attention to human emotion,” said Garret Ridinger, economics graduate student.
He performed the study with Michael McBride, UCI economics professor and co-director
of the Experimental Social Sciences Laboratory, ESSL.
They applied Reading the Mind in the Eyes Testing (RMET) to directly measure how the
introduction of monetary incentive changed a person’s ability to read emotion.
“On average men don’t care about understanding others’ emotions as much as women.
If we incentivize them, they care more,” said McBride of their findings.
The internal emotional gauge the researchers were trying to measure is called theory
of mind – the ability to understand other’s thoughts, intentions and emotions. It’s
something well-studied in psychology and most often understood due to its absence
or diminished capacity in those with autism and schizophrenia, but it’s a concept
that’s just taking hold in economics.
“Theory of mind is something uniquely human,” said McBride. “All people have this
ability to interpret emotional cues; some are more adept than others. It can’t be
directly measured but reading people is extremely important in being able to understand
social relationships.”
As behavioral economists, Ridinger and McBride are interested in how environmental
characteristics change a person’s performance and how gender plays into these fluctuations.
“We wanted to know what would happen if we threw money into the equation and whether
or not men and women would respond differently when paid for accurately interpreting
others’ emotions,” said Ridinger.
Their findings, published in PLOS One, also factored in competitive settings and charitable giving.
“There’s a lot of background literature on differences in base level engagement –
females are more inclined and intrinsically motivated in their theory of mind ability
whereas men have less intrinsic motivation. But the men respond to external incentives
more than women,” said McBride.
When both sexes were told they’d be paid for performance, intrinsic motivation was
crowded out for women; but men fared better. The effect was even stronger when men
and women competed with one another in reading emotions. But when informed that their
performance would result in a payout to charity, men dropped back and women bounced
back up so that the two genders finished equal (and money earned was actually donated
to charities including Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, the American
Cancer Society and UNICEF).
“It’s really interesting what this could mean for gender differences and monetary
incentives on a broader scale,” said McBride. “Our findings demonstrate that social
engagement and interaction with money differs by gender. Men can really be engaged
when money gets involved. We don’t know if they’re aware of this or if they recognize
these effects, but we think that our story is insightful and allows us to speculate
on – for example – the wage gap.”
While numerous reasons are to blame for the gap in incomes between men and women,
including gender discrimination, negotiation for higher wages is something that women
are historically less likely than men to do, he says.
“Wage negotiation is strongly about money. Our study suggests that when money is involved,
men are more engaged. It’s possible that one contributing factor in the wage gap is
men and women responding differently to the social engagement of wage bargaining settings.
Our study may help provide a new direction to explore in trying to understand this
pattern.”
He noted that their research also makes a strong case for women’s ability to negotiate
on behalf of others, based on their testing performance when results were tied to
charitable contributions.
“This is an important piece of the puzzle,” says Ridinger. “A lot of previous work
draws broad conclusions – people have done these tests and say across the board that
women are better than men at reading others’ emotions. But our work shows that there
are conditions under which that changes.”
Ridinger is interested in exploring these phenomena further; after receiving his Ph.D.
from UCI in June, he’s heading to an academic position in the School of Business at
the University of Nevada, Reno. He and McBride will continue to study the role of
theory of mind in fostering social cooperation; their work is funded by a Department
of Defense grant.
Read their full report online: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0143973.
-Heather Ashbach, UCI School of Social Sciences
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