Learning in the Household
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- We study social learning between spouses using an experiment in Chennai, India. We vary whether individuals discover information themselves or must instead learn what their spouse discovered via a discussion. Women treat their ‘own’ and their husband’s information the same. In sharp contrast, men’s beliefs respond less than half as much to information that was discovered by their wife. This is not due to a lack of communication: husbands put less weight on their wife’s signals even when perfectly informed of them. In a second experiment, when paired with mixed- and same-gender strangers, both men and women heavily discount their teammate’s information relative to their own. We conclude that people have a tendency to underweight others’ information relative to their own. The marital context creates a countervailing force for women, resulting in a gender difference in learning (only) in the household.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | August 9, 2021 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Conlon, John J. |
|---|---|
| Author | Mani, Malavika |
| Author | Rao, Gautam |
| Author | Ridley, Matthew |
| Author | Schilbach, Frank |
| Organizer of meeting | Bernheim, B. Douglas |
| Organizer of meeting | Beshears, John |
| Organizer of meeting | Crawford, Vincent |
| Organizer of meeting | Laibson, David |
| Organizer of meeting | Malmendier, Ulrike |
Subjects
| Subject | information |
|---|---|
| Subject | gender |
| Subject | communication |
| Subject | social learning |
| Subject | experiment |
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Working paper |
| Genre | Grey literature |
Bibliographic information
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- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Conlon, J., Mani, M., Rao, G., Ridley, M., and Schilbach, F. (2022). Learning in the Household. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/xd837dk6030
Collection
SITE Conference 2021
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- siteworkshop@stanford.edu
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