In a related new study of boys and girls, a team of psychology researchers has found that despite holding similar views on the purpose and value of negotiation, boys ask for bigger bonuses than girls do for completing the same work. The findings, reported in the journal Developmental Psychology, indicate that these outcomes are linked, in part, to differences in perceptions of abilities: in a series of cognitive tasks, boys had a higher opinion of their abilities and therefore asked for higher bonuses -- even though they performed no better than girls did in these tasks.

"Our findings suggest that boys tend to overestimate their abilities compared to girls -- and relative to their actual performance," says Sophie Arnold, a New York University doctoral student and the lead author of the paper. "This inflated self-perception may lead boys to feel more entitled to push the boundaries during negotiations."

"These findings offer new perspectives on the possible origins of negotiation disparities that exist between adult men and women in professional settings," concludes NYU Psychology Professor Andrei Cimpian, the paper's senior author.

The research, which also included Katherine McAuliffe, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College, consisted of a series of three experiments. The first two of these were used to ascertain if boys and girls had similar perceptions of negotiation.

In a pair of hypothetical scenarios, boys and girls -- aged six to nine -- were introduced to situations in which they could negotiate a bonus with a teacher for completing classroom work or with a neighbor for completing neighborhood work. In these hypothetical scenarios, boys and girls revealed similar perceptions of negotiation: they thought other children were similarly likely to negotiate, that it was similarly permissible to negotiate, that they would receive similarly little backlash for negotiating, and that negotiating would lead to similar rewards. Furthermore, girls and boys reported that they would negotiate to a similar extent in these hypothetical situations.

Through a subsequent experiment that included more than 200 child participants, the researchers sought to understand how boys and girls would negotiate based on their performance and their perceptions of this performance. Here, the children were asked to quickly identify images on a computer screen. The boys and girls performed roughly the same.

After these cognitive tasks, all children -- regardless of their performance -- were told that because of how they did, they should receive a bonus: pictures of animals. The children were then asked how many pictures they thought they should receive for their achievement.

Despite performing at approximately the same levels, there was a noticeable gender gap in how the participants responded to the question about the size of the bonus they thought they should receive:

"Boys leveraged their perceptions of how common and permissible it is to ask for more, while girls did not," explains McAuliffe. "This meant that, for example, when both girls and boys thought it was more common and more permissible to negotiate, boys negotiated more than girls did."

The research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (DGE-2234660).