Punishing defectors and rewarding cooperators: Do people discriminate between genders?
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Do people discriminate between men and women when they are in charge of punishing defectors or rewarding cooperators? Answering this question has potentially far-reaching implications on gender equity, since cooperative behaviour forms the basis of our societies and is typically enforced through punishment or rewarding. In this paper we report on two pre-registered experiments, that we hope shed some light on this question. Study 1 (N=1,077) shows that people do not discriminate between genders when they are in charge of punishing (rewarding) defectors (cooperators) in a one-shot public goods game. In this study, punishment/reward is implemented by asking participants whether they want to pay a cost to decrease/increase the payoff of a defector/cooperator. Study 2 (N=253) extends Study 1 to a different method of punishing/rewarding; participants are asked to rate the behaviour of a defector/cooperator from 1 to 5 stars. In this case too, we find that people do not discriminate between genders. All these results are robust to splitting the sample by gender: in our context, neither men nor women discriminate between genders when they are in charge of punishing defectors or rewarding cooperators.
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