Men and women decide which strangers to trust differently, a new study shows.
The study found that men generally trust people in the same group as him, while women are more likely to trust strangers with whom they share relationships, such as friends of friends.
"When meeting a stranger for the first time, men and women use different methods to determine who is in his or her circle," said Ohio State University psychology professor Marilyn Brewer, one of the study's co-authors. People, who decide who can be trusted. For a woman, the circle includes her and her friends and family; for a man, the circle includes his team or his company or his club. The findings show , men can be as sociable as women.”
"Some researchers claim that men aren't as sociable as women, but our research shows that men can bond widely with other people, just in different ways," Brewer said. Men seek the kind of symbolic connection that they get in the same group, not the kind of personal connection that women like."
The study involved 147 Ohio State students sitting in their Ohio State labs making an online decision—whether to accept the $3 a researcher was sure to pay or a promise of up to $11 from a stranger. an indeterminate amount.
The participant's knowledge of the stranger on the other end of the online connection was limited to one thing: the university at which he or she worked. The question for the participants was how much they trusted the stranger and on what basis. Participants actually had 3 choices. The first time was to tell the participants that the stranger was from the Ohio State University campus. In the second trial, participants were told that the stranger was from another university, but the participant had indicated earlier that he or she had friends at that university. In the third trial, participants were told that the stranger was from a certain university, but the participants had no acquaintances at that university.
The purpose of the experiment was to see which of the following 3 types of people the participants believed most: people who were on the same team as you (in this case, people at Ohio State University), people who might be connected to your friends ( Someone from a university you have acquaintances with) or a stranger from a university you don't have any ties to. After 3 trials, participants were asked to rate how much they trusted the stranger, and they were also asked to directly answer how much they thought that person would give them.
The results of the trial showed that, in this case, American college students were very trusting of strangers. Three-quarters of the students chose to give it a try, preferring to accept an undisclosed amount of money from a stranger than the $3 the researchers were sure to pay.
Men and women are no different in accepting unknown amounts of money from strangers instead of the $3 they are sure to get. But, the researchers say, it likely has to do with the fact that women aren't as adventurous as men.
But there were stark gender differences in participants' responses to the question of what kind of strangers they believed would give them more than $3. The boys said they were significantly more likely to trust Ohio State alumni than students at other colleges—regardless of whether they had acquaintances there. In addition to trusting alumni, girls are also
likely to trust strangers at the university with whom they have acquaintances.
The same gender differences emerged when the participants estimated how much money they expected each of the three strangers to give them. In this study, women seem to trust more people than men, Brewer said, because women trust both alumni and students from outside schools with whom they have acquaintances. That's because women's circles are based on
relationships, and men are more likely to accept people from a large symbolic group, even if they don't have a close personal relationship with those people.
Fang Liumin - "Modern Science and Technology Translation Series" - 2005-4