di Ginevra De Simone e Sara Metelli
Final assignment for the “Data Analysis” course in the Public and Corporate Communication Master’s program (COM), curriculum in Data Analytics for Politics, Society and Complex Organizations, a.y. 2024-2025, Università degli studi di Milano. Instructor: Professor Giulia Maria Dotti Sani.
Introduction, literature review and hypotheses
Using the European Social Survey data (Round 11 – 2023), this analysis explores how perceptions of fairness change across three generations (young adults, adults and older people) and between genders in Norway and Italy. In this paper we use the term “fairness” to describe people’s general belief about how others behave in social interactions: whether they tend to take advantage of others for their own benefit (low fairness) or instead try to act honestly and reciprocally (high fairness). These two countries were selected for this analysis because of their significant cultural and social differences. Norway is known for its high level of trust among citizens and institutions, and continuously ranks as one of the happiest countries in the world (World Happiness Report, 2023). On the other hand, Italy faces low trust in the institutions and a limited amount of trust and collaboration among citizens (Edelman, 2023). Moreover, while Norway ranks at the top of the 2024 Global Gender Gap Report by the World Economic Forum, Italy still struggles with gender stereotypes and equality, ranking 87th in the same year.
While earlier studies found that women generally tend to be less trusting than men (Chaudhuri et al., 2013), more recent research has shown that this gender gap in trust has diminished, to the point that we now cannot observe any significant differences between genders (Van den Akker et al., 2020). As regards age differences, research finds no remarkable age-related variations in trust, except for a slight tendency of trust to grow as people get older (Bailey et al., 2015).
Based on previous studies we formulated the following hypotheses:
- H1: Norwegians tend to be more trusting than Italians.
- H2: People are more trusting as their age increases.
- H3: Female young adults tend to be less trusting than male young adults .
Our analysis confirms that Norwegians perceive more fairness than Italians, while the perception of fairness increases with age only in Norway, while in Italy the trend is the opposite. Finally, the results for the last hypothesis only partially met our expectations.
Data and methods
For the analysis, we relied on the eleventh round of the European Social Survey (ESS11) collected in 2023. The data includes a question where respondents rate on a scale from 0 to 10 whether they believe people tend to take advantage of them (0) or try to be fair (10). This served as our dependent variable in the analysis. The independent variables include country, age and gender. To test the hypotheses, we kept the data collected only from Norway and Italy and from people over eighteen years old, and dropped all the other values. Then, we created three different age groups to test the generational differences: the first group includes individuals aged 18 to 35 (young adults), the second one those aged 36 to 60 (adults) and the last one includes individuals aged 60 and older (elders).
To test the first hypothesis, we ran a t-test comparing our dependent variable between the two countries. For the second hypothesis, we performed two linear regression models, one for each country, to explore the difference between the three age groups. For the final hypothesis we ran a linear regression to assess the interaction between gender and age in each country, in order to determine whether young males feel more fairness than young females both in Italy than in Norway.
Results
The results of the t-test to test the first hypothesis can be found in Table 1, which shows the mean perception of fairness with 95% confidence intervals in Italy and Norway. As observable, individuals in Norway report a significantly higher perception of fairness compared to those in Italy. Specifically, the mean perception of fairness in Italy is approximately 4.5, whereas in Norway, it is 6.9. The confidence intervals for the two countries are narrow and do not overlap, indicating a statistically significant difference. Furthermore, the p-value of 0.00 indicates that this difference is statistically significant.
These results indicate that perceptions of fairness vary considerably between the two countries, with Norwegian respondents perceiving fairness more positively than their Italian counterparts.
The regression results (Table 2) suggest that in Italy, the perception of fairness decreases with age. In particular, compared to young adults (the reference category), the estimated effect for adults is small and negative, but not statistically significant. The decline is more pronounced among elders, who exhibit a significant decrease of -0.47 points (p < 0.05). Figure 1 below graphically shows the results of the linear regression of perception of fairness by age group in Italy and Norway.
Differently, in Norway, the perception of fairness increases with age, with young adults reporting a mean perception of about 6.5, rising to 6.9 among adults and 7.2 among elders. The regression results (Table 2) suggest this positive association: adults report an average increase of 0.45, while elders show a larger increase of 0.68; both coefficients are positive and significant (p < 0.05). These results indicate that while in Italy, perception of fairness tends to decrease as age increases, the opposite trend can be observed in Norway.
In order to test our third hypothesis, we employed two linear regression models where we analysed the association between age groups and gender on the perception of fariness in both Italy and Norway. Figure 2 below shows Norway’s fairness perception scores are relatively high, with males reporting an average score of 6.79 and females of 7.01. These values suggest that fairness is generally strongly perceived by Norwegians. When we focus only on young adults, males report an average fairness perception of 6.37, while young females rate it slightly higher at 6.60. However, this difference is not statistically significant, as confidence intervals overlap. Thus, we cannot say that young men and women show significant differences in their perceptions of fairness in Norway.
Differently, perceptions of fairness in Italy are considerably lower. Men and women report almost identical fairness scores (around 4.56). Among young adults in Italy, fairness perceptions are significantly lower compared to Norway, yet an interesting gender pattern emerges. Young males report a fairness perception of 4.72, while young females rate it slightly higher at 4.92. Similarly to Norway, young women do not seem to be less trusting than men, at least not in terms of how they perceive fairness. However, these numbers remain noticeably lower compared to their Norwegian counterparts.
Conclusions
This short paper investigated perception of fairness and how it changes according to gender and age groups in Norway and in Italy. Our findings support the first hypothesis, as Norwegians generally report a higher average perception of fairness than Italians, for this reason we can clearly reject the null hypothesis of no difference in the perception of fairness in the two countries.
Our second hypothesis, concerning the increase of the perception of fairness with age, holds true only in Norway, while in Italy the trend appears to be the opposite (as suggested by Figure 1). In other words: in Italy, as people get older they tend to be less trusting, whereas in Norway, an increase in age is associated to an increase in the perception of fairness.
Finally, our third hypothesis cannot be corroborated, as the results from the linear regression analysis indicate that young females do not feel less fairness than young males in either country. This contradicts our initial assumption that young females would report a lower perception of fairness compared to their male counterparts. Notably, this trend persists despite the gender gap in Norway being slightly larger than in Italy, where people also report a generally lower average perception of fairness. The unexpected results leave us reflecting on its implications, as it challenges conventional expectations regarding gender disparities in perceived fairness.
References
Bailey, Peter E., Gillian Slessor, Martin Rieger, Paul G. Rendell, Ahmed A. Moustafa, and Ted Ruffman. 2015. “Trust and Trustworthiness in Young and Older Adults.” Psychology and Aging 30(4):977–86. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039736.
Chaudhuri, Ananish, Tanika Paichayontvijit, and Liang Shen. 2013. “Gender Differences in Trust and Trustworthiness: Individuals, Single-Sex, and Mixed-Sex Groups.” Journal of Economic Psychology 34:181–94. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167487012001134.
Edelman. 2023. Edelman Trust Barometer: Italy Report. Retrieved February 21, 2025 (https://www.edelman.it/sites/g/files/aatuss391/files/2023-02/2023%20Edelman%20Trust%20Barometer_Italy%20Report_Official.pdf).
Van den Akker, Olmo R., Marcel A. L. M. van Assen, Mark van Vugt, and Jelte M. Wicherts. 2020. “Sex Differences in Trust and Trustworthiness: A Meta-Analysis of the Trust Game and the Gift-Exchange Game.” Journal of Economic Psychology 81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2020.102329.
World Economic Forum. 2024. Global Gender Gap 2024: Insight Report. Retrieved February 21, 2025 (https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-gender-gap-report-2024/).
World Happiness Report. 2023. World Happiness Report 2023. Retrieved February 21, 2025 (https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2023/).
Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash