Correct Belief, Wrong Action and a Puzzling Gender Difference.

We asked subjects to self-select into one of two constests, "coin" or "die." The winner in each of the contest is the person with most correct guesses of 20 coin flips or 20 rolls of a die, respectively. Most subjects reported that they belived that most people would go to the "coin" group. They were correct. Although the right action under this belief is to choose "die" most people chose to be with the majority. Both men and women tended to make this mistake, but women's propensity to err in this particular experiment was stonger. This is puzzling as our overall impression does not support the wxistence of gender differences in strategic situations.