Sex differences in cooperation: A meta-analytic review of social dilemmas.

Abstract

Although it is commonly believed that women are kinder and more cooperative than men, there is conflicting evidence for this assertion. Current theories of sex differences in social behavior suggest that it may be useful to examine in what situations men and women are likely to differ in cooperation. Here, we derive predictions from both sociocultural and evolutionary perspectives on context-specific sex differences in cooperation, and we conduct a unique meta-analytic study of 272 effect sizes-sampled across 50 years of research-on social dilemmas to examine several potential moderators. The overall average effect size is not statistically different from zero (d ϭ -0.05), suggesting that men and women do not differ in their overall amounts of cooperation. However, the association between sex and cooperation is moderated by several key features of the social context: Male-male interactions are more cooperative than female-female interactions (d ϭ 0.16), yet women cooperate more than men in mixed-sex interactions (d ϭ -0.22). In repeated interactions, men are more cooperative than women. Women were more cooperative than men in larger groups and in more recent studies, but these differences disappeared after statistically controlling for several study characteristics. We discuss these results in the context of both sociocultural and evolutionary theories of sex differences, stress the need for an integrated biosocial approach, and outline directions for future research.

Psychometric properties and factor structure of the Temperament and Character Inventory-Revised (TCI-R) in a Croatian psychiatric outpatient sample

“…Although the majority of international TCI-R validation studies with adult samples did not examine gender differences, those that did converge on more pronounced HA, RD, and CO among women [14,16,19]. As was the case in the present study, Hansenne et al [16] also obtained the strongest effect for CO, in accordance with evolutionary perspective on human personality [38], although a recent meta-analytic study called into question the assertion that women are generally more cooperative than men [39]. It seems that future assessments of gender differences in cooperativeness should take into account the moderating roles of specific social contexts (e.g., women are more cooperative in larger social groups but less cooperative in same-sex interactions).…”

Feel Good, Do-Good!? On Consistency and Compensation in Moral Self-Regulation

“…The majority of our participants were female, which may pose potential problems to the validity of our results. Common belief is that women are less selfish than men (Balliet, Macfarlan, & Van Vugt, 2011;Eckel & Grossman, 1998). Since our task was designed to foster helping behavior among team members, it could be that the specific characteristics in our task favored female helping.…”

Average player traits as predictors of cooperation in a repeated prisoner's dilemma

“…Many studies have investigated how elements of game design can influence cooperation, as Sally's (1995) literature review demonstrates. Many other studies have looked at whether individual traits predict greater individual cooperative choices in both the repeated prisoner's dilemma and repeated public goods games (inter alia, Boone et al, 1999, Kurzban andHouser 2001), but aside from gender differences, very few have asked whether average traits of pairs of players predict greater joint cooperation (see Balliet et al (2011) for a meta-analysis of the gender and cooperation literature). This paper focuses on individual and pair-level traits that predict cooperation in a tenround prisoner's dilemma.…”