Gender differences in competitiveness and fear of failure help explain why girls have lower life satisfaction than boys in gender equal countries

Gender differences in competitiveness and fear of failure help explain why girls have lower life satisfaction than boys in gender equal countries. Kimmo Eriksson and Pontus Strimling. Front. Psychol., March 9 2023, Volume 14 - 2023. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1131837

Abstract: Among 15-year-olds, boys tend to report higher life satisfaction than girls. Recent research has shown that this gender gap tends to be larger in more gender-egalitarian countries. We shed light on this apparent paradox by examining the mediating role of two psychological dispositions: competitiveness and fear of failure. Using data from the 2018 PISA study, we analyze the life satisfaction, competitiveness, and fear of failure of more than 400,000 15-year-old boys and girls in 63 countries with known levels of gender equality. We find that competitiveness and fear of failure together mediate more than 40 percent of the effects on life satisfaction of gender and its interaction with gender equality. Thus, interventions targeting competitiveness and fear of failure could potentially have an impact on the gender gap in life satisfaction among adolescents in gender equal countries.

Discussion

In this paper, we have addressed the gender-equality paradox in adolescent life satisfaction. How can it be that the difference in life satisfaction between adolescent boys and girls is larger in more gender-equal countries? We proposed a novel kind of explanation: that the gender-equality paradox for life satisfaction can be pushed back to similar paradoxes for psychological dispositions that affect life satisfaction. Specifically, we proposed that fear of failure and competitiveness may play this mediating role.

We examined the life satisfaction, fear of failure, and competitiveness of 15-year-olds in 63 countries around the world. Replicating prior findings, we observed a male advantage in all three measures. In other words, boys are more satisfied with their life than girls are (Inchley et al., 2016), boys experience less fear of failure than girls do (Borgonovi and Han, 2021), and boys are more competitive than girls (Boneva et al., 2022). Moreover, in more gender-equal countries, we observe wider gender gaps in life satisfaction (Campbell et al., 2021), fear of failure (Borgonovi and Han, 2021), and competitiveness (Napp and Breda, 2022). Our study appears to be the first to examine these phenomena simultaneously.

We found the correlation between gender gaps and gender equality to be stronger for psychological dispositions (fear of failure and competitiveness) than for life satisfaction. This finding is in keeping with our hypothesis that the pathway by which gender and gender equality affect life satisfaction goes via psychological dispositions (Figure 2). More evidence for this hypothesis was obtained in a mediation analysis, which showed that fear of failure and competitiveness could account for 40 percent of the effects on life satisfaction of gender and its interaction with gender equality.

This work has both theoretical and practical implications. From a theoretical point of view, we have demonstrated a way to connect different instances of the gender-equality paradox. If X and Y are two individual-level variables and X influences Y, then the gender-equality paradox may hold for Y simply because it holds for X. In the case studied in the present research, X were certain dispositions and Y was life satisfaction. The same logic could potentially be used to connect other of the numerous instances of the gender-equality paradox. For example, it could be that the gender-equality paradox in personality (Costa et al., 2001) underlies several other instances of the paradox for variables that are influenced by personality. This is a topic for future research.

From a practical point of view, our findings describe both a problem and a potential solution. The problem is that girls’ life satisfaction is especially low in gender-equal societies. The potential solution is that interventions that target girls’ low competitiveness and high fear of failure in these societies could also be a way of achieving greater life satisfaction. How to conduct such interventions is beyond the scope of this study. The literature on interventions includes studies on both competitiveness (Boneva et al., 2022) and fear of failure (Stamps, 1973; Martin and Marsh, 2003), which may be a starting point.

An important limitation of the current study is that it relies on cross-sectional data, which do not provide information on causal directions. Thus, from the data we cannot exclude the possibility that the causal direction goes in reverse, that is, that young people’s level of life satisfaction may influence their competitiveness and fear of failure. Intervention studies may also provide evidence for our working assumption about the causal direction.

Another limitation is that life satisfaction was measured by a single item. Such measures are sensitive to individual differences in response style. Response style could similarly bias the measure of competitiveness, because although it is measured using several items, they are all coded in the same direction. The same goes for fear of failure. However, it is unlikely that our findings are driven by response style, as competitiveness and lack of fear of failure are coded in different directions yet give similar results.

Self-selection biases in psychological studies: Personality and affective disorders are prevalent among participants

Kaźmierczak I, Zajenkowska A, Rogoza R, Jonason PK, Ścigała D (2023) Self-selection biases in psychological studies: Personality and affective disorders are prevalent among participants. PLoS ONE 18(3): e0281046, Mar 8 2023. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281046

Abstract: Respondents select the type of psychological studies that they want to participate in consistence with their needs and individual characteristics, which creates an unintentional self-selection bias. The question remains whether participants attracted by psychological studies may have more psychological dysfunctions related to personality and affective disorders compared to the general population. We investigated (N = 947; 62% women) whether the type of the invitation (to talk about recent critical or regular life events) or the source of the data (either face-to-face or online) attracts people with different psychopathology. Most importantly, participants who alone applied to take part in paid psychological studies had more symptoms of personality disorders than those who had never before applied to take part in psychological studies. The current results strongly translate into a recommendation for either the modification of recruitment strategies or much greater caution when generalizing results for this methodological reason.

Discussion

The main aim of this project was to investigate self-selection biases related to the prevalence of personality disorders in psychological studies. We tested whether different types of research invitations attract different research participants in terms of their psychopathology. Indeed, people who replied to an advertisement on a study on a negative critical life event and its psychological consequences that took place up to two months before the research and led them to low mood had not only more personality disorders (PDs), but also the number of symptoms for different types of PDs compared to those who volunteered for a study on a regular life event and non-volunteers. Also, participants who replied to an advertisement on a study on a recent negative critical life event without the low mood requirement had more symptoms than those who volunteered for a study on a regular life event and non-volunteers. Still those who never participated in research before (i.e. non-volunteers) were likely to show the least symptoms of PDs compared to those who did, suggesting that people with the healthiest structure of personality (and reflecting the general population) are not usually included in research samples or are relatively rarely.

At the same time, personality disorders (more numerous and higher in volunteers) are associated with rigid (and maladaptive) beliefs and the resulting inflexible behavioral patterns [34, 35]), which may be of great importance in experimental research, particularly while interpreting the effectiveness of an experimental manipulation, but also in the identification and/or description of any psychological phenomena. Many studies show that participants with PDs demonstrate specific attentional coping styles [36] and biased attention to emotions and facial expressions [37, 38], which might interplay with all experimental procedures.

Comparing the studied groups to the general population, it should be noted that both the ratio of participants who met the criteria of a PD (from six to 75% depending on a type of PDs and an advertised study) and the number of clinically diagnosed PDs (from three to six coexisting PDs dependent on a type of an advertised study) are unexpected outcomes. All comparison groups differed to a greater or lesser extent from the distribution of PDs in the general population, regardless the wide range of the results. Studies show that it ranges from 4.4% to 13.4% [14, 39] for the European population and from 9.0% to 21.5% [3, 40] for the United States population. The highest overall prevalence of PDs (equal to 45.5%) has been identified amongst psychiatric patients [31], and it is still lower than in one of our advertised study (i.e., after a critical life event that took place up to two months before the research and led to low mood).

In addition, the prediction that the personality organization of both online participants and volunteers who applied for different types of face-to-face studies will be more pathological in comparison with non-volunteers was verified in the project. However, there were no differences in the intensity of Borderline PD symptoms, nonetheless volunteers who participated in a critical life event study and with low mood were diagnosed with this disorder most frequently. Although such key words included in the research invitation as “low mood” and “negative critical life event” had the power to attract people with particularly increased personality psychopathologies, it should be noted that all volunteers, regardless the experimental group, were characterized with its higher level. It might suggest that apart from participation in a study, they might indirectly seek for a psychological help and for a reason, however this hypothesis requires further investigation.

Furthermore, online participants were higher on depression and anxiety (their mean scores indicate clinical “caseness” using the cut-off of 11 points suggested by Zigmond and Snaith [31] as compared to those who never participated in research before (their mean scores indicate a borderline level for depression and clinical “caseness” for anxiety; [31] This finding is in line with some previous studies [13], however it is important to acknowledge that the online survey was conducted during COVID-19, which might have an aversive impact on participants. As Bueno-Notivol et al. [41] showed in their meta-analysis, the prevalence of depression (25%) in COVID-19 is even seven times higher compared to its global estimation in 2017. At the same time, although it causes a methodological restriction to adequately compare all groups, we cannot ignore the fact that all data collected during the pandemic is based on this specific research samples (e.g., most research is done remotely). Hence, paradoxically, the Internet sample from our study delivers a characteristic of the subjects who we are actually being studied now.

Additionally, our study was conducted in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. This means that the heightened state of anxiety that emerged in almost everyone was not able to alter enduring dispositional personality traits. As longitudinal studies have shown, change is a dynamic and temporal process. A longitudinal study of Caldioroli et al. [42] involving 166 individuals affected by different psychiatric disorders at three time points (t0 as pandemic outbreak, t1 as lockout period, t2 as re-opening) showed significant deterioration during the lockout period with little improvement during the re-opening. Moreover, only psychopathology in patients with schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive symptoms were not significantly improved at t2. Individuals with PDs were at higher risk for overall psychopathology than those with depression and anxiety/obsessive-compulsive and exhibited more severe anxiety symptoms than schizophrenic patients.

Summing up, as (1) volunteers vary in terms of psychopathology depending on the type of both invitation and study they wanted to participate in, and also differ from those individuals who usually do not come to psychological research, (2) there is no basis for assuming that the presented findings are an isolated case. Hence, it is advisable to interpret all psychological research outcomes considering the impact of the form of invitation to the research and the type of research itself on the potential psychopathology of the participants. Moreover, the research outcomes need to be interpreted in close connection with the finding of larger psychopathology of the volunteers compared to non-volunteers. This conclusion translates into a recommendation for either the modification of recruitment strategies or much greater caution when generalizing results for this methodological reason.