  Men and women systematically differ in their beliefs about their performance
relative to others; in particular, men tend to be more overconfident. This
paper provides support for one explanation for gender differences in
overconfidence, performance-motivated reasoning, in which people distort how
they process new information in ways that make them believe they outperformed
others. Using a large online experiment, I find that male subjects distort
information processing in ways that favor their performance, while female
subjects do not systematically distort information processing in either
direction. These statistically-significant gender differences in
performance-motivated reasoning mimic gender differences in overconfidence;
beliefs of male subjects are systematically overconfident, while beliefs of
female subjects are well-calibrated on average. The experiment also includes
political questions, and finds that politically-motivated reasoning is similar
for both men and women. These results suggest that, while men and women are
both susceptible to motivated reasoning in general, men find it particularly
attractive to believe that they outperformed others.
