It is one of the noble duties of social science to quantitatively prove the obvious.
In the Ultimatum Game, subjects are asked to divide a sum of money between themselves and a partner. The partner then has a choice: they can accept the proposed division, in which case it’s carried out (and the players really get the money), or they can reject it, in which case both players get nothing.
Last week in Padang (West Sumatra) I had 104 subjects play the game in all sorts of different forms. When playing anonymously (and when the partner is anonymous as well), women tended to offer significantly more than men; their divisions were far more generous. There could be a bunch of reasons for this, obviously.
The difference could be due to different levels of “risk aversion” across gender (a different preference for “safe bets” over higher gambles). If women in my sample have higher risk aversion levels, then they might give more in the Ultimatum game in order to avoid the risk of their partners rejecting the offer (in which case both players get nothing).
When testing for risk aversion, women do actually exhibit significantly higher levels than men (finding a measure for risk aversion that avoids issues of Muslim injunctions against gambling was not trivial). This explains some of the variance in Ultimatum offers, but it’s not the whole story. Even when controlling for risk aversion, there’s still a significant difference in Ultimatum offers by gender. Something else is driving the result too.
Proving the obvious becomes easier if you include another game. When anonymously playing the Dictator Game (in which people divide a sum of money between themselves and others as they see fit, with no acceptance or rejection), women also give far more than men do. In a sense, women exhibit a far greater degree of fairness (or perhaps even altruism), and are willing to incur the very real financial cost associated with it. Women are nicer.
But interestingly, when anonymity is partially removed (when some information about both partners was revealed in the game), men were coaxed into offering (much) more than they would otherwise, essentially closing the gap with women’s offers. Women on the other hand, didn’t seem to modify their behavior significantly. Notably, this was true both in the Ultimatum and the Dictator games.
To sum (these are useful tips for life in general): 1. Women are nicer.
2. Men need to be monitored or they’ll be up to no good.
* Big caveat: I've had the data for less than a week. You can imagine how confident I am about the analysis at the moment.
The interesting thing about testing gender differences in Padang, is that it’s actually not obvious at all. The Minangkabau (the ethnicity of West Sumatra) are a matrilineal society (the biggest matrilineal society in the world, I think; they’re rare.) Inheritance among Minang is passed down through the female line (not to be confused with a matriarchal society, where women would be in political control.) As many Indonesians have pointed out to me, if anywhere you were to expect the gender stereotypes on property to be absent or reversed, it would be Padang. And a bonus of doing the experiments in Padang was the possibility of a side project on gender differences, actually hoping to contradict the obvious (a recent study did just that in a another matrilineal society with games designed specifically for it.)
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As you can gather, I’ve just returned from Padang, after yet another series of incredibly busy weeks. I wish I could blame my advisors or friends for not warning me how much work and how many unforeseen details experiments in a foreign country would entail, but I can’t. I knew what I was getting in to. (To be perfectly honest, though, the opportunity to spice academic life with actual “doing” and managing is a big reason I chose this kind of fieldwork.) The Padang experiments are now complete, and next week I return to Yogya to run the experiments in two universities there. If all goes as planned, I should have the experiments done in a few weeks, and take my first vacation of the year.
The results so far are, I’m afraid, more ambiguous than the pilot results (the gender issues, while very interesting to me in the Padang setting, are not really the core of this study, which is about the effects of politically motivated identities on experimental behavior). There’s still a lot in the data, and I’m basically happy with it, but it’s not as clean cut as it seemed before (big surprise….) I’m eager to see if the difference is due to the very different sites – the pilot was in Yogya (Java) – or due to a fluke in the pilot. I’ll know more pretty soon, I hope.
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Back to the Minangkabau: Minang matrilineality is actually a very interesting case of ethnicity vs. religion in Indonesian culture (ethnic cultural norms are generally known as adat, as opposed to religion, agama). Islamic inheritance law is very different from Minang custom, of course, and the Minangkabau tend to be devoutly Muslim (they sometimes look down upon the “syncretic” Javanese, with their strong Hindu/Buddhist cultural baggage).
As was pointed out to me by Dr. Delacroix (Aussie Minangkabau linguist extraordinaire), there are two types of inheritance now in place. Pusaka Tinggi (“high” inheritance) follows the matrilineal adat, and includes most real estate and family property. These are passed down through daughters. Property acquired through work and business during one’s life, however, is usually Pusaka Rendah (“low” inheritance) and will often follow Muslim law. It’s fascinating how easily these mixes and contradictions are incorporated, and how natural it seems to people within the culture (I spent a while asking the research assistants about this over our usual lunch at the university canteen, facing the Indian Ocean.)
The mix of matrilineal-yet-patriarchal society produces odd cases. A banker in Padang told me of a young woman who wanted to marry a Muslim Batak man (Batak is a family of prominent ethnicities in North Sumatra, all very distinct from Minang – and from Javanese). Her father didn't object, but the marriage could not take place because her mother’s brother – the one with final say on these matters – would not allow it (no one seemed to care what the mother, or the young woman herself, thought). Of course, a marriage would entail bringing the young man into the family and wealth of the mother’s side, not the father's side…
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Unrelated:
1. What people won’t do to get on the Colbert Report
2. Store keepers will often just give you candy instead of change here (change is in short supply; my cousin actually sold some to me, once, although he was also paying for dinner, so I can’t really complain.) Apparently, one bule tried to pay with candy for beer and broccoli (via this)
