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Organizational contexts establish conditions that seem paradoxical, but it is unclear when and why individuals notice and respond to paradoxes. This paper examines how culture and conditions interact to shape whether individuals adopt paradoxical frames. We used cooperation and competition among American and Chinese people as an empirical setting. Using lay categories as a theoretical framework, we predicted that specific types of conditions, colleagues' outperforming and out-helping each other, can be interpreted as instances of both cooperation and competition. Study 1 found that Chinese people were more likely than Americans to adopt paradoxical frames in just these types of conditions and that the cross-cultural difference was attributed to differences in paradox mindset. Study 2 found that in just these types of conditions, Chinese people were more likely to engage in simultaneously cooperative and competitive behavior and this was attributed to differences in the use of paradoxical frames. Thus, culture and conditions interact to influence when people invoke and apply paradoxical frames.

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W e provide evidence that cooperation is a cultural category, and that what it means to cooperate is culturally conditioned. We use a cultural consensus model analysis to assess which types of situations people categorize as cooperation and whether these categorizations are consistent within and across China and the United States. The data support revisiting the role of cognition in mediating cooperative behavior and the means by which culture shapes behavior. The data also support broadening research attention to multiple aspects of cooperation within the same theory, generating new research on reciprocity, and rethinking how key behaviors, such as competition and helping, relate to cooperation.

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Gender‐related categorization is a key feature of the literature on gender in negotiation. While previous literature focused on context‐free traits such as warmth and competence, we examine how people categorize specific negotiation goals and behaviors as masculine and feminine across the United States and China in different negotiation contexts, illustrating the role of cultural and situational contexts in gender‐related categorization. Two studies found that while American participants categorized competitive goals and behaviors as masculine and cooperative ones as feminine across business‐to‐consumer (B2C) and business‐to‐business (B2B) negotiation contexts, Chinese participants' patterns depended on the negotiation context. In B2C contexts, Chinese participants categorized competitive goals and behaviors as feminine and cooperative ones as masculine; in B2B contexts, they made further distinctions, categorizing competitive goals and behaviors that are socially inappropriate as feminine, but competitive ones that are socially appropriate, and cooperative goals and behaviors, as masculine. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.