Competition for Trophies Triggers Male Generosity

Abstract

BackgroundCooperation is indispensable in human societies, and much progress has been made towards understanding human pro-social decisions. Formal incentives, such as punishment, are suggested as potential effective approaches despite the fact that punishment can crowd out intrinsic motives for cooperation and detrimentally impact efficiency. At the same time, evolutionary biologists have long recognized that cooperation, especially food sharing, is typically efficiently organized in groups living on wild foods, even absent formal economic incentives. Despite its evident importance, the source of this voluntary compliance remains largely uninformed. Drawing on costly signaling theory, and in light of the widely established competitive nature of males, we hypothesize that unique and displayable rewards (trophies) out of competition may trigger male generosity in competitive social environments.Principal FindingsHere, we use a controlled laboratory experiment to show that cooperation is sustained in a generosity competition with trophy rewards, but breaks down in the same environment with equally valuable but non-unique and non-displayable rewards. Further, we find that males' competition for trophies is the driving force behind treatment differences. In contrast, it appears that female competitiveness is not modulated by trophy rewards.SignificanceOur results suggest new approaches to promoting cooperation in human groups that, unlike punishment mechanisms, do not sacrifice efficiency. This could have important implications in any domain where voluntary compliance matters — including relations between spouses, employers and employees, market transactions, and conformity to legal standards.

Wallflowers: Experimental Evidence of an Aversion to Standing Out

“…This may suggest that women are more concerned than men about standing out or being judged as image motivated. This fear may relate to women's reluctance to engage in competition (Gneezy et al 2003, Gneezy and Rustichini 2004, Niederle and Vesterlund 2007, Pan and Houser 2011, Kanthak and Woon 2012. Hence, women behave as wallflowers (choosing middle actions) in order to opt-out of the status competition that may be introduced when actions are publicly recognized.…”

The Dark Side of Competition for Status

“…On the one hand, symbols may incite individuals to outperform others in order to obtain a trophy or to avoid the stigmatization of a negative symbol (e.g. Kosfeld and Neckermann, 2011;Pan and Houser, 2011). On the other hand, previous studies have shown that small monetary but also non monetary rewards such as gold stars, candies or thank-you gestures may crowd-out intrinsic motivation (Deci, 1975;Harackiewicz, 1979;Gneezy and Rustichini, 2000;Cameron et al 2001;Frey and Jegen, 2001;Shalley et al, 2004).…”

What happens if you single out? An experiment

“…Eckel et al 2010); or it is conferred at the end of a play to top contributors as a form of incentive to stimulate competition and promote cooperation (e.g. Pan and Houser 2011). Other early studies explored more broadly the implications of social status, for instance, in markets (e.g.…”