BulkWhiz: Negotiating as a Startup Founder in the UAE
Citation:
Coffman, Katherine B. "BulkWhiz: Negotiating as a Startup Founder in the UAE." Harvard Business School Multimedia/Video Supplement 920-701, September 2019. View Details|
Working Paper HBS Working Paper Series 2019 Stereotypes and Belief Updating |
Abstract
We explore how beliefs respond to noisy information about own ability across a range of tasks, with a particular focus on how gender stereotypes impact belief updating. Participants in our experiments take tests of their ability across different domains. Absent feedback, beliefs of own ability are strongly influenced by gender stereotypes. We then provide noisy feedback about own absolute performance to participants and elicit posterior beliefs. Gender stereotypes have significant predictive power for posterior beliefs, both through their influence on prior beliefs (as predicted by a Bayesian model) and through their influence on updating. Both men and women’s beliefs are more responsive to information in gender congruent domains than gender incongruent domains. This is primarily driven by differential reactions to exogenously received good news about own ability: both men and women react more to good news when it arrives in a gender congruent domain than when it arrives in a gender incongruent domain. Our results have important implications for understanding how feedback shapes gender gaps in self-assessments.
Keywords: beliefs; Gender; Prejudice and Bias; Information; Performance; Perception;
Citation:
Coffman, Katherine B., Manuela Collis, and Leena Kulkarni. "Stereotypes and Belief Updating." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-068, January 2019.
