Are Women More Pessimistic Than Men?

A fair coin is going to be flipped 10 times. Each time it lands on heads, you'll win $10. How many times do you think you'll win?

This question was posed to 1,540 people by three French researchers: Selima Ben Mansour, Elyes Jouini and Clotilde Napp.

If you're at all familiar with probability, you'd guess that most of the subjects would say $50. But you'd be wrong. The average response was actually 3.9 with over 75 percent of people choosing an outcome less than five. (The researchers argue that their subjects understood probability theory, but their subsample for testing this included only 60 people.)

The researchers say the results suggest that when people are faced with a situation they have no control over, they're likely to expect a harsher outcome than probability would indicate. (In an extreme example, this pessimistic bias might help explain why some people are extremely afraid of flying despite the fact that the chances of being in a deadly accident are quite small.)

Women were also found to be more pessimistic than men (the coin was expected to land on heads 3.8 times for woman versus 4.0 times for men) and optimism declined with age for both men and women.

For their part, psychologists have documented that humans have an optimistic bias, but the researchers explain this apparent contradiction by saying that they were testing biases in investment-like situations.

When the test-takers were asked general questions about themselves and their own futures, the optimistic bias popped back up.

The jury is out on why this pessimism bias might exist: is it because people overestimate from bad experiences; or are we used to losing in games of chance because of the way casino games are stacked against us; or perhaps we try to avoid regret by lowering expectations in the first place?

Here are some graphics from the paper. The first shows the distribution of results across all respondents. The zero on the x-axis represents the number of people who said they should win $10 five out of ten times. To the left is the population of respondents who thought they would win less than five times and vice versa.

This graphic shows the splits between men and women: