Politically-motivated reasoning is similar for both men and women, but only men find it particularly attractive to believe that they outperform others

Gender differences in motivated reasoning. Michael Thaler. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 191, November 2021, Pages 501-518. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2021.09.016

Highlights

• I experimentally study whether there are gender differences in motivated reasoning.

• I find that there are significant gender differences in motivated reasoning about performance on a knowledge task: men systematically motivatedly reason to think they outperformed others, while women do not.

• I also find that there are sizeable gender differences in overconfidence in the same direction as motivated reasoning.

• I find that gender differences in motivated reasoning is only observed on the question about performance, and that there are no differences in politically-motivated reasoning.

• Results suggest that men and women are both susceptible to motivated reasoning in general, but that only men find it particularly attractive to believe that they outperform others.

Abstract: Men and women systematically differ in their beliefs about their performance relative to others; in particular, men tend to be more overconfident. This paper provides support for one explanation for gender differences in overconfidence, performance-motivated reasoning, in which people distort how they process new information in ways that make them believe they outperformed others. Using a large online experiment, I find that male subjects distort information processing in ways that favor their performance, while female subjects do not systematically distort information processing in either direction. These statistically-significant gender differences in performance-motivated reasoning mimic gender differences in overconfidence; beliefs of male subjects are systematically overconfident, while beliefs of female subjects are well-calibrated on average. The experiment also includes political questions, and finds that politically-motivated reasoning is similar for both men and women. These results suggest that, while men and women are both susceptible to motivated reasoning in general, men find it particularly attractive to believe that they outperformed others.

Keywords: Motivated reasoningOverconfidenceGender differencesExperimental economics

JEL: J16D83C91D91