Handedness, Earnings, Ability and Personality. Evidence from the Lab

Evidence showing that on average left-handed (L), who are 10% in a population, tend to earn less than others is solely based on survey data. This paper is the first to test the relationship between handedness and earnings experimentally and also to assess whether the mechanism underlying it is predo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one Vol. 11; no. 10; p. e0164412
Main Author: Sartarelli, Marcello
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: United States Public Library of Science 27.10.2016
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Subjects:
Adult
Behavior
Biology and Life Sciences
Brain research
Cognition
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive ability
Earnings
Economics
Experiments
Female
Females
Functional Laterality - physiology
Gender
Handedness
Higher education
Human behavior
Humans
Hypotheses
Income - statistics & numerical data
Labor market
Laboratories
Male
Neurosis
Null hypothesis
People and Places
Personality
Personality traits
Profits
Psychology
Skills
Social Sciences
Studies
Surveys and Questionnaires
Young Adult
Young adults
United Kingdom > UK
New York
United States > US
ISSN:1932-6203, 1932-6203
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Evidence showing that on average left-handed (L), who are 10% in a population, tend to earn less than others is solely based on survey data. This paper is the first to test the relationship between handedness and earnings experimentally and also to assess whether the mechanism underlying it is predominantly cognitive or psychological. Data on 432 undergraduate students show that L do not obtain significantly different payoffs, a proxy for earnings, in a stylised labour market with multiple principals and agents. Similarly, scores in the Cognitive Reflection Test are not significantly different. Data on personality, measured using the Big Five test, show, instead, that L are significantly more agreeable and L females more extroverted. In addition, earnings significantly vary with personality only for L, increasing with extraversion and decreasing with neuroticism. Overall, our results fail to reject the null hypothesis that earnings do not differ by handedness and suggest differences in personality as a novel mechanism to rationalise L's behaviour.
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Competing Interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist.
Conceptualization: MS. Data curation: MS. Formal analysis: MS. Funding acquisition: MS. Investigation: MS. Methodology: MS. Project administration: MS. Resources: MS. Software: MS. Supervision: MS. Validation: MS. Visualization: MS. Writing – original draft: MS. Writing – review & editing: MS.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0164412