Anger and Gender

Anger is provoked by frustrated expectations and triggers a punishment response. When expectations reflect social identities, punishment may vary accordingly. We design an online experiment on an Italian sample (N=597 trustor-dictators) where subjects play a trust game followed by an allocation game with punishment options, a sequence designed to elicit genuine emotional reactions upon learning whether their counterpart defected. We elicit beliefs under incentive compatibility and measure emotional responses using thePANAS scale. We apply the belief-dependent model of anger by Battigalli et al. (2019b) to derive our predictions.In our data, defection triggers a strongly negative emotional reaction, with anger being the dominant response. Anger correlates with elicited beliefs about trustworthiness among subjects who best respond to their expectations, and anger in turn predicts punishment. Female trustors hold higher trustworthiness expectations toward female trustees than toward male ones, while no analogous pattern emerges for male trustors. Defection by a female trustee triggers a stronger anger response in female trustors, in line with the larger expectation gap. Punishment follows a cross-gender pattern, consistent with in-group bias. Overall, our results suggest that gender bias in punitive behavior emerges both from expectation-driven frustration and from residual preference-based differences.