Gender-based pairings influence cooperative expectations and behaviours

Abstract

The study explores the expectations and cooperative behaviours of men and women in a lab-in-the-field experiment by means of citizen science practices in the public space. It specifically examines the influence of gender-based pairings on the decisions to cooperate or defect in a framed and discrete Prisoner's Dilemma game after visual contact. Overall, we found that when gender is considered behavioural differences emerge in expectations of cooperation, cooperative behaviours, and their decision time depending on whom the partner is. Men pairs are the ones with the lowest expectations and cooperation rates. After visual contact women infer men's behaviour with the highest accuracy. Also, women take significantly more time to defect than to cooperate, compared to men. Finally, when the interacting partners have the opposite gender they expect significantly more cooperation and they achieve the best collective outcome. Together, the findings suggest that non verbal signals may influence men and women differently, offering novel interpretations to the context-dependence of gender differences in social decision tasks.

Figure 1

Cooperation and expected cooperation by gender. The heatmap shows the ratio of cooperation and expectation of cooperation by gender in the Prisoner’s Dilemma with (n = 290) and without (n =374) visual interaction. The number in each cell shows the ratio; the colour represents the standardised mean difference, calculated as the difference in means between groups for each behavioural domain divided by the standard deviation of each behavioural domain. See Supplementary Table S5 for further details.

Figure 2

Behavioural domains by gender pairing. Cooperation refers to the ratio of cooperative decisions; Expectation refers to the ratio of positive expectations regarding the partner’s behaviour, namely cooperation; Amusement refers to the ratio of positive arousal following eye contact; Accuracy refers to the ratio of correct guesses regarding the partner’s behaviour; Payoff refers to the average payoff. The number in each cell shows the normalised value; the colour represents the standardised mean difference, calculated as the difference in means between groups for each behavioural domain divided by the standard deviation of each behavioural domain. See Supplementary Tables S6, S7, S8, and S10 for further details.

Figure 3

Boxplot of response time by gender. The boxplots represent the log-transformed response time (expressed in seconds) of men’ and women’ cooperation and defection in the Prisoner’s Dilemma with visual interaction. See Table 2 and Supplementary Tables S11, S12, and S13 for further details.