Share and Share Alike? Intelligence, Socialization, Personality, and Gender-Pairing as Determinants of Giving

We conduct dictator game experiments in which women and men are allowed to split $10 with a completely unknown person or a person of known gender. Subjects also complete personal background surveys, personality tests, and a cognitive test. We find that (a) gender information significantly affects giving only in the case of women, who give systematically less to women than to men and persons of unknown gender; (b) largely on account of this difference, women give less than men on average, although the difference is not statistically significant; (c) giving is significantly explained, especially for women, by background, psychological measures, and the cognition score; (d) the main findings are corroborated in separate trials of the experiment at a public and a private university in two different U.S. regions.