Experimental Design
Part I
a. Individual work - participants work individually on a task outlining a survival situation. They answer a series of questions consisting of selecting which items they find most important for survival. We use an expert solution to evaluate these answers and determine payoffs in the different parts of the experiment.
b. Confidence elicitation - we measure participants' confidence in their answers on several confidence dimensions (local, global, relative).
c. Confidence manipulation - [Treatment assignment] - Participants receive a noisy feedback signal about their relative performance in Part 1.a. Those whose performance was in the top 50% are assigned to an urn with a higher probability of drawing a black ball (indicating good news), while those whose performance was in the bottom 50% are assigned to an urn with a higher probability of drawing a red ball (indicating bad news). Then, a ball is randomly drawn from the assigned urn, and the color of the ball determines whether they are assigned to the "good news" or "bad news" treatment.
d. Post-signal confidence elicitation: participants are given the chance to update their relative confidence, i.e. their belief on being in the top 50% of a reference group after seeing the signal
Part 2
a. Appointment of a group leader - participants are informed that they will perform a similar task involving a different survival situation. They are also told that they are grouped with 3 other participants in the session, with whom they will work for this task. Before starting Part 2.b, a group leader will be appointed, whose role is to suggest an answer to other group members. Other group members can choose whether or not to follow the leader’s suggestion, but eventually everyone gets the same payoff which is based on the average score of the group. Once participants are informed of these procedures, they indicate how much they want to become the leader, on a scale between 1 and 10 (“Willingness to Lead”). The group members who indicate the highest motivation are selected to become group leaders.
b. Group work - following the procedures described above, participants complete the second task.
c. Confidence elicitation: - We elicit beliefs about (individual) performance in the second part, and a belief on group dynamics.
d. Evaluation of Leader - group members are asked to evaluate the leader's performance on a scale from 1 to 10, and leaders are asked to evaluate their own performance as a leader on the same scale.
Part 3 - IAT Test, Questionnaire, and Payment
a. IAT - participants take an implicit association test (IAT), eliciting the strength of their implicit associations between leadership and being male.
b. Questionnaire - participants answer questions about their gender identity, willingness to take risks, personality traits using a reduced version of the Big Five Inventory (BFI-10), beliefs about gender differences in task performance, attitudes on gender and leadership, previous leadership experience and motivation for their answer to the WTL question. We collect demographic information on age, gender and occupation/field of study.
c. Hypothetical Scenario - We present participants with a hypothetical leadership scenario similar to the responsibility treatment that we had in a previous data collection and ask them questions about what they would do in this scenario.
d. SVO task - We elicit participants’ social preferences using the six primary SVO Slider items (Murphy et. al, 2011).
e. Feedback and Payment - participants receive feedback on their performance in Part 1 and 2. They also have the opportunity to view the experts' solutions to better understand their scores. One the two parts of the experiment is randomly selected to determine payment.