Close Relationships Textbook: Social Psychology 11th Edition-Saul Kassin, Markus, & Fein. (Chapters 9-10) Chadee Theories in Social Psychology 1st Edition (Chapter

BRIEF REPORT

Social Heuristics and Social Roles: Intuition Favors Altruism for Women but Not for Men

David G. Rand and Victoria L. Brescoll Yale University

Jim A. C. Everett Oxford University

Valerio Capraro Center for Mathematics and Computer Science,

Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Hélène Barcelo Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, CA

Are humans intuitively altruistic, or does altruism require self-control? A theory of social heuristics, whereby intuitive responses favor typically successful behaviors, suggests that the answer may depend on who you are. In particular, evidence suggests that women are expected to behave altruistically, and are punished for failing to be altruistic, to a much greater extent than men. Thus, women (but not men) may internalize altruism as their intuitive response. Indeed, a meta-analysis of 13 new experiments and 9 experiments from other groups found that promoting intuition relative to deliberation increased giving in a Dictator Game among women, but not among men (Study 1, N � 4,366). Furthermore, this effect was shown to be moderated by explicit sex role identification (Study 2, N � 1,831): the more women described themselves using traditionally masculine attributes (e.g., dominance, independence) relative to traditionally feminine attributes (e.g., warmth, tenderness), the more deliberation reduced their altruism. Our findings shed light on the connection between gender and altruism, and highlight the importance of social heuristics in human prosociality.

Keywords: altruism, prosociality, intuition, dual process, gender

Supplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000154.supp

Humans often choose to help others. Yet such prosociality typically requires us to expend time, effort, and money. What makes us willing to do so? Recently, there has been considerable interest in exploring human prosociality using a dual process perspective (for a review, see Zaki & Mitchell, 2013), where decisions are conceptualized as resulting from competition be- tween cognitive processes that are automatic, fast, and intuitive, versus those that are controlled, slow, and deliberative (Kahneman,

2003; Sloman, 1996). Does prosociality require deliberative self- control, or do prosocial impulses get reined in by the calculus of self-interest?

The Social Heuristics Hypothesis (SHH) has been proposed as a theoretical framework for answering this question (Peysakhovich & Rand, 2015; Rand et al., 2014). The SHH adds an explicitly dual process lens to theories regarding the adoption of typically advan- tageous behaviors (e.g., theories based on “spillover” effects [Ki- yonari, Tanida, & Yamagishi, 2000], norm internalization [Chudek & Henrich, 2011], and consequences of interdependence in one’s social interaction experiences [Van Lange, De Bruin, Otten, & Joireman, 1997]). The SHH posits that the social strategies which are typically successful in daily life become automatized specifi- cally as intuitive responses. Deliberation can then override these intuitions and adjust one’s behavior in light of the details of the specific decision at hand.

In particular, the SHH argues that a key component of deliber- ation is the consideration of strategic concerns and payoff maxi- mization, which favors self-interested behavior. As a result, delib- eration is predicted to sometimes undermine prosocial intuitions, but not to push selfish intuitions toward prosociality. A mathemat- ical model of dual-process agents playing Prisoner’s Dilemma games formalizes this prediction (Bear & Rand, 2016): among all

This article was published Online First February 25, 2016. David G. Rand, Departments of Psychology and Economics, and School

of Management, Yale University; Victoria L. Brescoll, School of Manage- ment, Yale University; Jim A. C. Everett, Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University; Valerio Capraro, Center for Mathematics and Computer Science, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Hélène Barcelo, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, CA.

Funding by the John Templeton Foundation and the National Science Foundation (Grant 0932078000) is gratefully acknowledged. We also thank the authors of the studies included in our meta-analysis for sharing their data.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to David G. Rand, Department of Psychology, Yale University, Box 208205, New Haven, CT 06520-8205. E-mail: [email protected]

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Journal of Experimental Psychology: General © 2016 American Psychological Association 2016, Vol. 145, No. 4, 389 –396 0096-3445/16/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000154

389

possible strategies, the dual-process strategies that perform best (and thus are favored by evolution, social learning, and/or strategic decision-making) use deliberation to switch from cooperation to defection in one-shot anonymous settings. Conversely, strategies that use deliberation to switch from defection to cooperation (under any circumstances) never perform well, and are always disfavored.

By this account, where typically successful strategies are intu- itive, intuition should favor cooperation for most people: in the context of daily life, most important interactions (e.g., with co- workers, friends, and family) are repeated. Thus, because cooper- ation is non-zero-sum, cooperating can be in one’s long-run self- interest: cooperating with others today can induce others to cooperate with you in the future (Rand & Nowak, 2013). Con- versely, when interacting in settings where future consequences are not enough to incentivize cooperation (e.g., one-shot anony- mous laboratory experiments), it is never in one’s self-interest to cooperate; and, therefore, deliberation should favor selfishness. As predicted by this account, experimentally promoting intuition rel- ative to deliberation via time pressure or a conceptual priming exercise has been found to increase cooperation on average in one-shot anonymous interactions (Cone & Rand, 2014; Lotz, 2015; Protzko, Ouimette, & Schooler, 2015; Rand, Greene, & Nowak, 2012; Rand, Newman, & Wurzbacher, 2015); for a meta- analysis, see Rand et al. (2014).

The implications of the SHH for altruism (unilaterally giving resources to others), however, remain unclear. On the one hand, a narrow read of the SHH suggests that, like deliberation, intuition should disfavor altruism: transferring money to someone and then having them transfer it back does not make one better off than just keeping the original money, and so altruism (unlike cooperation) is not advantageous even in repeated games. On the other hand, a broader interpretation of the SHH suggests that intuition may favor altruism in a similar way to what has been observed with cooper- ation. If being selfish in the context of zero-sum interactions is seen negatively by others, it may create reputational costs in the context of other (non-zero-sum) interactions. If so, then altruism could be payoff maximizing in the long run. However, it may not be the case that all people are harmed from being seen as selfish, such that moderators may exist for whether altruism is advanta- geous in daily life (and thus favored by intuition).

A particularly compelling candidate for such moderation is gender. Specifically, we might expect women, but not men, to have altruism as their intuitive social response for two reasons. First, a large body of work suggests that the behavior of men and women is governed by stereotypes concerning their social roles; and in particular that women are expected to be communal and unselfish, whereas men are expected to be agentic and independent (Eagly, 1987). When women behave in ways that are perceived as insufficiently communal, they are not only liked less, but they are also less likely to be helped, hired, promoted, paid fairly, and given status, power, and independence in their jobs (Heilman & Okimoto, 2007). Thus, women are subject to much stronger ex- pectations that they will behave altruistically (Heilman & Chen, 2005). Furthermore, recent work has found that women are well aware of these gender stereotype-based behavioral prescriptions, and their concern over encountering backlash effects from violat- ing these stereotypes helps explain, in part, a range of behaviors that systematically vary by gender (Brescoll, 2011). As a result,

behaving altruistically in accordance with others’ expectations is typically advantageous for women.

Second, the fact that women disproportionately occupy roles that either mandate self-sacrificing and altruistic behavior (e.g., mother) or, at the very least, require a great deal of other-oriented, communal behavior (e.g., nurse; Eagly, 1987), may cause women to habituate to being altruistic. And even women who do not explicitly occupy such family or work roles may acquire altruistic intuitive social responses because female peer groups are markedly more communal and egalitarian than male peer groups, and thus make self-sacrificing, unselfish behavior socially adaptive (Mac- coby, 1998). Taken together, consideration of both the expecta- tions of others and the behaviors one engages in regularly point to intuition favoring altruism for women more so than men.

In this paper, we experimentally investigated the role of intu- ition and deliberation in altruism, and the potential moderating role of gender. In Study 1, a meta-analysis of 22 giving studies where cognitive processing was manipulated revealed the predicted in- teraction between cognitive processing mode and gender: promot- ing intuition increased altruism in women but had no significant effect in men. Study 2 then investigated the mechanism behind this effect by examining whether identification with gender norms moderated the sex differences found in Study 1.

Study 1

Method

In Study 1, we conducted a meta-analysis (N � 4,366) of new and existing studies looking at the effects of experimentally ma- nipulating the use of intuition versus deliberation on giving in the Dictator Game (DG). In the DG, participants unilaterally decide how to divide actual money between themselves and an anony- mous recipient. Across studies, we used the percentage of the endowment given to the recipient as our measure of altruism.

To minimize file-drawer effects, we began by including all data each of the authors of the present study had ever collected where cognitive processing was manipulated in a zero-sum dictator game (including failed pilots, experiments with problematic design fea- tures, etc.). We had 13 such experiments (all previously unpub- lished), each of which manipulated cognitive processing using either time constraints or conceptual priming. To avoid selection effects, we included participants who disobeyed the time con- straints.

Reducing the amount of time subjects have to decide shortens the window of opportunity for deliberation to rein in intuition, leading to more intuitive decisions (Wright, 1974). Therefore, in the time constraint experiments, reliance on intuition was in- creased by asking subjects to make their giving decision in less than a specified number of seconds (time pressure) and was reduced by asking subjects to wait and think for at least a specified number of seconds before deciding (time delay). The conceptual priming conditions, on the other hand, used a writing exercise at the outset of the experiment to induce more or less intuitive decision making (Shenhav, Rand, & Greene, 2012). Reliance on intuition was increased by asking subjects to write about a time in their life where following their intuition worked out well, or where carefully reasoning through a problem worked out poorly. Reli- ance on intuition was decreased by asking subjects to write about

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390 RAND, BRESCOLL, EVERETT, CAPRARO, AND BARCELO

a time in their life where following their intuition worked out poorly, or where carefully reasoning through a problem worked out well.

We also included data from other labs by doing a comprehen- sive database search and requesting raw data (including gender) for experiments in which cognitive processing was manipulated in dictator games with the standard setup of (a) a single anonymous recipient, and (b) a decision space ranging from completely selfish to completely altruistic. For cognitive process manipulations, in addition to time pressure and conceptual priming, we also included experiments that used cognitive load (where participants had to engage in a more or less cognitively demanding task, such as holding a 7-digit vs. 3-digit number in working memory, while completing the DG).1

In total, we received data sets for nine additional experiments (Benjamin, Brown, & Shapiro, 2013; Cornelissen, Dewitte, & War- lop, 2011; Evans, 2014; Hauge, Brekke, Johansson, Johansson- Stenman, & Svedsäter, 2014; Kinnunen & Windmann, 2013). Thus, Study 1 aggregated data from 22 experiments, for a total of 4,366 participants (52.7% female, Mage � 29.8). (Please see online supple- mental material Table S1, which provides details for each experi- ment).

Results and Discussion

As predicted, random-effects meta-analysis of DG giving found a significant interaction between gender and cognitive processing mode, effect size 5.5 percentage points, 95% CI [2.6, 8.5], Z � 3.66, p � .0001 (see Figure 1). There was no evidence of publi- cation bias (Egger’s test, t � �.28, p � .79; Begg’s test, z � �.31, p � .76), or of heterogeneity in the true size of this interaction across studies, chi2(21) � 16.04, p � .77. Furthermore, metare- gression found no significant difference in interaction effect be- tween studies run online versus in the physical laboratory, t � .22, p � .83 (interaction effect: 6.1 percentage points in lab, 5.4 percentage points online); and no significant differences in inter- action effect size across methods of manipulating cognitive pro- cessing, F(2, 19) � .4, p � .68 (interaction effect: cognitive load, 6.4 percentage points; conceptual priming, 6.1 percentage points with; time constraints, 2.7 percentage points).

Examining simple effects showed a significant positive effect of promoting intuition among women (see Figure 2), effect size 3.8 percentage points, 95% CI [1.9, 5.7], Z � 3.87, p � .0001; resulting in on average 10.8% more giving in the high intuition condition relative to the low intuition condition. Conversely, there was no significant effect among men (see Figure 3), effect size �2.0 percentage points, 95% CI [�4.2, .001], Z � 1.87, p � .062. Again, there was no evidence of heterogeneity in effect size across studies (women, chi2(21) � 13.1, p � .91; men, chi2(21) � 16.4, p � .75).

Study 2

Study 1 showed an interaction between gender and cognitive processing mode: intuition favored unilaterally helping others for women, but not for men. Although this effect was consistent with our predictions based on the SHH and the differential daily-life value of altruism for women versus men, the goal of Study 2 was to provide more direct evidence for social norms as the proposed

mechanism. Specifically, if sex differences in the relationship between intuition, deliberation, and altruism are driven by social norms associated with men and women’s social roles, then indi- vidual differences in the extent to which people adopt such sex role norms should moderate this relationship. In particular, for women, explicit self-identification with traditionally masculine attributes was predicted to influence deliberative responses but not intuitive responses.

Women who identify with masculine attributes are still per- ceived by the world as women, and thus are subject to the altruistic expectations placed upon women (making altruism typically ad- vantageous for them). Since intuitive responses are not within one’s conscious control, but instead implement typically advanta- geous behaviors, the intuitive responses of even women who explicitly adopt masculine attributes should be as altruistic as women who explicitly identify with feminine attributes; and wom- en’s intuitive responses should be more altruistic than men’s, regardless of whether women identify more with masculine versus feminine attributes.

When deliberating, however, explicit gender role identification was predicted to influence women’s altruism: women who identified more with masculine attributes were predicted to shift in the direction of men (i.e., to become less altruistic), because altruism is disfavored by both (a) masculine gender roles (which involve power, dominance, and independent self-interest) and (b) deliberation’s general tendency to make people consider strategic self-interest.

Women who explicitly identify with feminine attributes, on the other hand, deliberatively embrace traits that are consistent with altruism, and are in conflict with the self-interested effects of strategic deliberation. Thus, deliberation should not affect their behavior in the DG. For the same reason, men who explicitly identify with feminine attributes should also not override their selfish intuitions to become more altruistic when deliberating. Finally, for men who identify with masculine attributes, their intuitive and deliberative responses are in alignment, both favoring relative selfishness, which again leads to no predicted effect of deliberating. Study 2 directly tested these hypotheses.

Study 2 also explored a second potential moderator, how strongly participants felt that gender norms were enforced in their lives, which was unsuccessful for reasons that we believe were practical, rather than theoretically informative, in nature (see on- line supplemental material section 2 for details).

Method

Study 2 took advantage of the fact that three of our experiments from Study 1 (K, L, and M), in which participants completed the conceptual priming manipulation described in Study 1 and made a single dictator game decision (total N � 1,831; 51.5% female, Mage � 35.0 years), also included questions about self- identification with male and female sex roles (the short-form of the

1 We did not include ego depletion, based both on evidence that ego depletion may not function in the same way as other cognitive process manipulations (Inzlicht & Schmeichel, 2012), and the fact that we were only able to obtain data from one depletion study with a total of 54 participants (Halali, Bereby-Meyer, & Ockenfels, 2013); including these data does not qualitatively alter our key results.

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391INTUITION FAVORS ALTRUISM FOR WOMEN BUT NOT FOR MEN

Bem Sex-Role Inventory [BSRI; Bem, 1977]).2 Participants indi- cated the extent to which each of 20 attributes (10 traditionally masculine, 10 traditionally feminine) described them (from 1 � never or almost never true to 7 � always or almost always true).3

We then classified participants’ gender role identification as mas- culine versus feminine using a median split on the sum of all masculine items minus the sum of all feminine items (Hoffman & Borders, 2001).

Results and Discussion

Study 2 reproduced the pattern observed in the meta-analysis: an analysis of variance (ANOVA) predicting DG giving based on cog- nitive processing mode, gender, and study demonstrated an interac- tion between cognitive processing mode and gender, F(1, 1819) � 3.85, p � .050, effect size 4.4 percentage points, such that dictator giving was significantly greater among women when intuition was promoted (M � .40, SD � .23) relative to deliberation (M � .37, SD � .24), t(941) � 2.08, p � .038; but cognitive process did not significantly affect giving among men (intuition: M � .32, SD � .27; deliberation: M � .33, SD � .27), t(886) � .58, p � .55. No other terms were significant (p � .15 for all), except for a significant main effect of gender, F(1, 1819) � 29.5, p � .001, effect size 6.3 percentage points, such that women (M � .39, SD � .24) gave more than men (M � .33, SD � .27). In particular, because the three-way

interaction between gender, cognitive processing mode, and study was not significant, F(2, 1819) � .46, p � .63, we collapsed across study in our subsequent analyses.

To test for moderation, we conducted an ANOVA predicting DG giving using gender, cognitive processing mode, and sex role self- identification (0 � feminine, 1 � masculine).4 In addition to signif- icant main effects of gender F(1, 1823) � 18.53, p � .0001, such that women were more altruistic than men, and sex role self-identification, F(1, 1823) � 13.57, p � .0002, such that feminine participants were more altruistic than masculine participants, we observed the predicted significant three-way interaction between gender, cognitive process-

2 The order (i.e. whether the moderator questions came before or after the conceptual priming task and DG) was randomized. Our analyses collapsed over order, rather than analyzing the effect of order, because a substantial difference in attrition rates between the orders prevented valid causal inference about order effects.

3 Traditionally masculine attributes: willing to take a stand; defends own beliefs; independent; has leadership abilities; strong personality; forceful; dominant; aggressive; assertive; willing to take risks. Traditionally femi- nine attributes: affectionate; warm; compassionate; gentle; tender; sympa- thetic; sensitive to needs of others; soothe hurt feelings; understanding; loves children.

4 Our results are qualitatively equivalent when using a continuous mea- sure of sex role self-identification, but for ease of calculating and display- ing simple effects of cognitive processing mode, we used the median split.

Overall

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Study

I

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F

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ID

A

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5.52 (2.57, 8.48)

6.46 (-2.74, 15.65)

10.18 (-0.44, 20.79)

7.53 (-8.12, 23.19)

20.05 (2.97, 37.14)

3.60 (-16.92, 24.13)

-0.59 (-19.78, 18.59)

2.10 (-9.26, 13.45)

17.39 (1.62, 33.17)

1.7

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