The Roles of Gender and Employment Status in Abdication Decisions

Abstract

Abdication—the act of giving up a choice to another person—has been shown to prompt reciprocal generosity (Kardas et al., 2018), but it is not clear whether men or women are more likely to engage in abdication. The present research utilized a gift card scenario adapted from Kardas et al. (2018) in two Amazon Mechanical Turk samples to explore whether women abdicated more frequently than men, whether men abdicated to women less frequently than to other men, and whether employment status predicts abdication. In experiment one, participants ( N = 520) were assigned to one of three conditions in which they had to either choose who received a hypothetical gift card themselves or abdicate the decision to a friend (sex not specified, male friend, or female friend). Chi-square analyses revealed no significant differences between participants who abdicated and those who allocated; men and women had similar abdication patterns; there was no significant difference in abdication as a function of friend gender for male or female participants. In experiment two, participants ( N = 707) were again assigned to one of the three conditions but were also asked their employment status. Chi-square analyses indicated that participants generally preferred to be allocators rather than abdicators; women showed a similar abdication pattern to men; there was no significant difference in abdication as a function of friend gender for male or female participants. Lastly, unemployed participants abdicated more frequently (70%) than their employed counterparts (42%), and this was especially likely for women. These results have implications for potential factors that influence abdication decisions.