ArticleScientific reports2023
Women compared with men work harder for small rewards.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 8 citations in OpenAlex.
- Motivation and reward processing across sex/gender and the menstrual cycle: a biopsychosocial perspective.Biology of sex differences · 2026Article
- Sex differences in low-dose ethanol effects on motivated behavior and limbic corticostriatal activity in mice.Alcohol, clinical & experimental research · 2026Article
- Sex Differences in Low-dose Ethanol Effects on Motivated Behavior and Limbic Corticostriatal Activity.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- The Mediating Role of Academic Self-Efficacy Between Gender and the Intention to Resume Schooling Among Depressed Adolescents: An Empirical Study from China.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- The sinking platform test: a novel paradigm to measure persistence in animal models.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In cost-benefit decision-making, women and men often show different trade-offs. However, surprisingly little is known about sex differences in instrumental tasks, where physical effort is exerted to gain rewards. To this end, we tested 81 individuals (47 women) with an effort allocation task, where participants had to repeatedly press a button to collect food and money tokens. We analyzed the motivational phases of invigoration and effort maintenance with varying reward magnitude, difficulty, and reward type. Whereas women and men did not differ in invigoration, we found that women showed higher effort maintenance as well as higher subjective wanting and exertion ratings for small rewards compared with men. Notably, men increased their effort more than women for higher rewards to match women's levels of performance. Crucially, we found no sex differences depending on reward type or difficulty, indicating that sex differences were specific to the encoding of the magnitude of benefits, not costs. To summarize, women exerted higher physical effort for small rewards, which corresponded with an elevated subjective value in women compared with men. Therefore, sex differences in perceived reward magnitude may contribute to differential behavioral preferences highlighting the potential of cost-benefit decision-making to provide insights about potential mechanisms.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.