Gender, Context and Trust

We explore gender differences in trust and reciprocity in a finitely repeated version of the Berg, Dickhaut and McCabe (1995) trust game where we provide an explanation of the incentives inherent in the game to the participants. We look at two different control treatments, one where participants only get written instructions and another where these instructions are also read aloud. Our three experimental treatments are with an explicit “context” where we provide an explanation of the game being played. We find that both genders show a higher level of trust and reciprocity when the game is explained to them. We find that men exhibit more trust and reciprocate more compared to women when we remove strategic uncertainty. Contrary to with many previous studies, we do find men are significantly more reciprocal than women when strategic uncertainty is eliminated. We do not find any evidence that cognitive demand effects differ by gender.