In many organisational contexts, managers rely on limited information—such as employee self-evaluations or observable relative performance—when making decisions about task allocation, promotions, and compensation. While there is ample evidence on the role of individuals’ often-biased self-representations, much less is known about how such expressions are judged by others. This study examines how managers interpret signals of employee performance and self-confidence, focusing on whether these interpretations differ systematically by manager gender and if biased self-assessments are perceived as typically male or female. To address these questions, I conduct a laboratory experiment with 192 employers evaluating 576 employees. The results reveal substantia gender differences: female employers consistently perceive employees—particularly high performers—as about 0.2–0.3 standard deviations less confident than male employers. Explicit information on self-confidence inaccuracies strongly activates gender stereotypes: principals predominantly associate underconfidence with female employees and overconfidence with male employees. These findings underscore the presence of social biases in interpreting performance and self-confidence, with potential implications for gender dynamics and managerial decisions in organisations that rely on employee self-evaluations.

We use a lab-based negotiation with alternating offers for a salaried lab job to study gender gaps in interactive negotiation behaviour. Despite being faced with the same incentive and job, we show that females ask for less compared to males to do the same work although the gender gap is small in magnitude. Moreover, females accommodate more to the request of the counterpart both in the role of a worker or employer. That is, they adjust their own ask to a larger extent than males do, thus being less assertive. Testing also if gender salience plays a role in explaining these gender gaps we find weak evidence of more aggressive behaviour within male-to-male pairings, while less in female-to-female pairings. Female players are therefore sometimes more successful. Our finding complements the previous literature on gender gaps in asking behaviour, while the result on gender gaps in accommodating behaviour provides new insights to the field by providing another explanation as to why women in general work for lower salaries compared to men in the labour market.

This paper explores the understudied link between self-consciousness and vaccine scepticism, combining an experimental approach with causal forests to estimate individual treatment effects. Leveraging data from a lab experiment with Italian university students, we find that individuals who are more easily induced to self-conscious responses (e.g., feeling shame or embarrassment) tend to hold stronger vaccine misbeliefs. Rather than a causal effect of self-consciousness elicitation on vaccine attitudes, our results highlight a correlation between pre-treatment attitudes and susceptibility to self-conscious emotions. This underlines the importance of policy interventions aimed at effective public health communication, since more sceptical individuals may avoid discussing with health professionals or develop self-conscious emotions as the result of these discussions, further exacerbating their vaccine hesitancy.