Gender Differences in Motivated Reasoning

TL;DR

This study investigates gender differences in motivated reasoning, revealing that men are more prone to distort information to overestimate their performance, unlike women, which explains observed gender disparities in overconfidence.

Contribution

The paper provides empirical evidence linking performance-motivated reasoning to gender differences in overconfidence, highlighting that men distort information more to believe they outperform others.

Findings

Men exhibit more performance-motivated reasoning than women.

Male beliefs are systematically overconfident, female beliefs are well-calibrated.

Political reasoning is similar across genders, unlike performance-related reasoning.

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.