Abstract
In this study, we report experimental results on the dictator decision collected in two neighboring ethnic minority groups, the matrilineal Mosuo and the patriarchal Yi, in southwestern China. We follow the double-blind protocol as in Eckel and Grossman (in Handbook of experimental economics results, 1998), who find that women in the U.S. donate more than men. We find this pattern reversed in the Mosuo society and find no gender difference in the Yi society. This is highly suggestive that societal factors play an important role in shaping the gender differences in pro-social behavior such as dictator giving.
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Notes
Latami (2009) calls the Mosuo society “a gift society” for their extreme emphasis on frequent gift exchange. Every scenario has a gift code in the Mosuo custom.
Walking marriage is a non-binding relationship between a man and a woman that is mostly one to one and stable, whereby a man can visit his partner at night but has to go back to his mother’s home in the early morning, and has no financial obligation to his partner and children except that voluntary gift-giving is common. Children are raised by the mother’s family and the uncles play the farther’s role. This unique feature distinguishes the Mosuo from other well-known matrilineal cultures like the Khasi in India. Note, conventional marriage has become an option due to various sorts of outside influence in the last 50 years. However, there is no evidence showing that this option has impacted the cultural education of gender roles. We refer to Appendix B.3 of ESM for additional survey results. See Shih (2000) and Latami (2006) for further discussions.
Along the patrilineal lineage, however, the Mosuo are more related to the Tibetans, which reflects the influence of Lamaism in the Mosuo culture. See Wen et al. (2004) for a comprehensive genetic marker study, with further discussions of ethnic migrations.
All these results are based on the above standard DG, where the dictator forgoes the same amount of money for every dollar given to the recipient. When giving becomes cheaper, Andreoni and Vesterlund (2001) shows that gender difference can be reversed, which implies that men might care more about efficiency while women care more about equality. In this paper we would like to put aside the efficiency concern and focus on equality and altruism.
In Hoffman et al. (1994), subjects on average gave about $2.7 in the standard dictator game but only $0.9 in the double blind 1 design, which suggests that anonymity is extremely crucial in such experiments.
Due to scarcity of subjects, ours differs from Eckel and Grossman (1998) which assigns 14 same-gender dictators and one monitor to each session.
The purpose of having one envelop without money in each session is to make it possible for the recipients receiving no money to guess that maybe the dictator did not get money in the first place, so that the dictators will not feel as guilty if they take all the money. Andreoni and Bernheim (2009) provide the theoretical foundation and supporting experimental evidence that by changing the observability of the dictator choice (e.g. the ratio of empty envelopes) one can affect the donations systematically. That implies our higher ratio of empty envelopes than that in Eckel and Grossman (1998) might give our subjects more moral wiggle room to give less.
A minor difference on execution is that Eckel and Grossman (1998) require the total number of bills and paper slips each subject takes out to be exactly 10, which we did not find feasible in our field environment. Consequently, it becomes obsolete to also copy their feature of having 20 slips of paper in the no-money envelop. Since the paper we used was thicker than money, envelopes with and without money did not look very different.
These subjects were voters in a local election. Every household in this village sent one delegate to vote. Since there were about twice as many female delegates as male ones, we recruited all males but only randomly selected some females. Our data analysis reveals no discernible differences regarding the voter subjects, as shown in Table 3.
Note that these observations are in some sense comparable to those in Andersen et al. (2008). In the much more complicated public good games, they find that men in the matrilineal Khasi society donate significantly more than men in the neighboring Assamese Hindi and Muslim societies, although Khasi men only donate slightly more than Khasi women in the positive treatment.
Since we had only one male instructor and two female instructors, one for each ethnicity, we cannot distinguish the experimenter gender effect from any other experimenter effect.
We take the conservative approach and treat these two cases of $15 as donations of $10 in our data analysis. Also, these six generous men were from five different sessions across both experimenters and both locations. So, there is little reason to believe that these donations were due to any procedural mistakes or sample selection bias.
Note, however, the entitlement literature often also lists “natural drive or education for competition” as one reason for male entitlement claims. Mosuo men, in fact, are educated from childhood to be competitive, brave, and risk-taking, just like men in other patriarchal societies. Gong and Yang (2011) in a parallel study on simple risk decisions show that Mosuo women are more risk averse than men, unlike the finding of no gender difference among the Khasi in Gneezy et al. (2009). Also, Zhang (2013) shows Mosuo high school boys to be more competitive than girls.
Henrich et al. (2005, 2010) find that market integration as measured in percentage of purchased calories (PPC) is positively related to the giving behavior. The rationale is that higher PPC is associated with higher rate of exchanges between strangers, which in turn requires more pro-social behavior as facilitator for efficient transactions.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Yan Chen, Rachel Croson, Dan Friedman, Catherine Eckel, Uri Gneezy, Elizabeth Hoffman, John List, Ulrike Malmendier, Jane Zhang and participants at the 2008 and 2010 International ESA meetings and 2010 Econometric Society World Congress for helpful comments and encouragement. We want to give our special thanks to Latami Dashi, Deng Pan and our Mosuo and Yi research assistants for their continual help throughout the project. Financial support from NSC-Taiwan (96-2415-H-001-006-MY2) and Fudan University Young Faculty Research Grant is gratefully acknowledged.
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Gong, B., Yan, H. & Yang, CL. Gender differences in the dictator experiment: evidence from the matrilineal Mosuo and the patriarchal Yi. Exp Econ 18, 302–313 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-014-9403-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-014-9403-2