Abstract
Research on Swedish school children has found that boys tend to be overconfident about their grades in mathematics, while girls tend to be underconfident. We find similar results for El Salvadorian children. Mathematics is considered a masculine task and we show that these findings do not carry over to a gender neutral task (social science), where both sexes tend to be overconfident. We find that girls in a single-sex school are more underconfident in their mathematics abilities than girls in a co-ed school, which may suggest that gender stereotypes become reinforced in single-sex environments.
Highlights
Previous research indicates that people are generally overconfident in diverse areas as car-driving, investment decisions, entrepreneurial behavior, running, stock market forecasts, answering quiz questions, and solving fictitious mathematical problems (e.g., Beckmann & Menkhoff, 2008; Croson & Gneezy, 2009; Deaves, 2010; Koellinger et al, 2007; Svensson, 1981)
Previous confidence research has been more occupied with individual rather than social psychology, and we aim to fill this gap by introducing context as a crucial component of the analysis
Since we find that girls in the single-sex school tend to be underconfident while those in mixed schools tend to be overconfident in the masculine typed task, the results may suggest that single sex environments reinforce stereotypes of gender typedness
Summary
Previous research indicates that people are generally overconfident in diverse areas as car-driving, investment decisions, entrepreneurial behavior, running, stock market forecasts, answering quiz questions, and solving fictitious mathematical problems (e.g., Beckmann & Menkhoff, 2008; Croson & Gneezy, 2009; Deaves, 2010; Koellinger et al, 2007; Svensson, 1981). On the other hand, is generally considered gender neutral and by including it in addition to mathematics in our study, we are able to investigate whether the results in Dahlbom et al (2010) generalize to non-masculine tasks. The gender differences between Israeli boys and girls in running race performance found by Gneezy and Rustichini (2004) were not found in a similar study on Swedish schoolchildren conducted by Dreber et al (2011), and JohanssonStenman and Nordblom (2010) find no gender differences in overconfidence in an economics exam in Sweden. One aim of this study is to find out whether Dahlbom et al.’s (2010) results are generalizable to youth in less gender equal societies Another aim is to investigate differences between the highly gendered topic of mathematics and the less gendered topic of social science.
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