On confident men and rational women: It’s all on your mind(set)

• Manipulating the mindset affects overconfidence, risk aversion, and anchoring.
• The mindset manipulation interacts with gender.
• For men, the implemental mindset increases confidence, risk aversion, and anchoring.
• In women, the implemental mindset increases confidence and reduces risk aversion.

We tested the hypothesis that inducing the deliberative and the implemental mindset differently affects judgment and decision making. More specifically, we explored mindset effects on decision makers’ confidence ratings, risk preferences, and susceptibility to anchoring effects. As earlier research on mindsets showed that individual differences sometimes moderate mindset effects, we also tested for interaction effects of mindset and gender. For confidence ratings, we found a main effect of mindset and a main effect of gender. For risk preferences and anchoring effects, mindset interacted with gender. When being in an implemental mindset, the judgments of female decision makers came closer to their actual performance compared to being in a deliberative mindset where they were observed as underconfident. Male decision makers were already overconfident in the deliberative mindset and showed even more overconfidence when being in an implemental mindset. Concerning risk attitudes it was found that female decision makers were more prone to choose the less risky, but also less profitable option (in terms of expected payoffs) when they were in the deliberative compared to the implemental mindset. For men the opposite effects were observed. When investigating anchoring effects, male but not female participants’ judgments were influenced by mindset: In an implemental mindset, male participants followed an irrelevant anchor more strongly (i.e., made more anchor-consistent judgments) compared to being in a deliberative mindset.