News

Please read the entire thing. You would see how it was on topic if you did, that’s how I know you haven’t.

Sometime in the early 2000’s Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini conducted a very intriguing field study in an elementary school in Israel [1]. The participants were prepuberty140 children, 75 boys and 65 girls, all in the fourth grade between 9–10 years of age. The researchers studied the performance of the children in a race alone over a short distance of 40 meters (~131 feet) with the teacher measuring their speed. Girls and boys ran on average at the same speed. Then the majority of the children ran a second time with the teacher matching the children in pairs, starting with the two fastest children in the race going down the list independent of gender. Each pair ran on the same track, with the two children running alongside this time. Now, the boys improved while the girls ran slower. In eight mixed-pair races of 11 observations (73%) in which boys were slower than the girls initially, they beat the competition in the head-on second stage. In the remaining 18 mixed-pair races, where the girls had a worse time in the first round, only three girls won the competition (17%). To combat experimental threats, the researchers wisely kept a separate group of children as controls who ran alone in round two as well. This group, yet again showed no gender differences in speed and thus dispelled alternative explanations such as girls getting tired faster than boys. Based on the results, Gneezy and Rustichini concluded “Overall, we find support for the claim that competition increases the performance of males relative to females…This indicates that some strong, robust, and general factors are involved.” They then raised further: “The puzzle that remains concerns the more subtle effects of competition in homogeneous and heterogeneous groups.” (p. 380).