Are Women More Cooperative Than Men in Social Dilemmas?

Sell, Jane; Griffith, W. I.; Wilson, Rick K.

doi:10.2307/2786779

Cited by 64 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Generally, as children get older boys become more competitive. Nevertheless, in experimental studies investigating competition and cooperation, women can be just as competitive as men (Sell 1997;Sell et al 1993), even within the realm of athletics (Theberge 1997). Moreover, boys' desire to compete is not contingent on opponent gender, whereas for girls, the context of the competitive situation (such as if they are competing against a male or a female) influences enacted competitiveness (Carli 1989).…”

Section: Competitivenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deconstructing the Myth of the Monolithic Male Athlete: A Qualitative Study of Men’s Participation in Athletics

2008

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A qualitative study using field-based methods examined motivations for participation in collegiate team sports, the psychological and emotional rewards of team membership, and the dynamics of relationships with teammates among male athletes. Previous cross-disciplinary research largely reinforces clear and consistent gender differences within communal and agentic domains. In-depth, oral bibliographic interviews with 11 varsity athletes from basketball and soccer teams were conducted at a university in the USA. Participants spoke freely about multiple dimensions of their experiences as athletes-experiences frequently dichotomized by researchers as masculine or feminine. Analyses document that male athletes rated the importance of interpersonal and emotional relationships with teammates as valuably as they did instrumental needs. Results are discussed in terms of cultural imperatives that polarize domains presumed to be highly gender based and sex-segregated.

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Section: Competitivenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deconstructing the Myth of the Monolithic Male Athlete: A Qualitative Study of Men’s Participation in Athletics

2008

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“…Women in HG societies are frequently described as being cooperative, 144 particularly in their gathering duties, 138,139 but these societies provided opportunities for female competition and power seeking in other aspects of communal life. Low, in her examination of traditional peoples around the world where women have a notable amount of power, identifies numerous ways that women exert their ambition and strength.…”

Section: Cognitive Influences: Evolved Traits and Individual Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender, risk assessment, and political ambition

Sweet-Cushman

2016

Polit. life sci.

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ABSTRACT. In the United States, women have long held the right to vote and can participate fully in the political process, and yet they are underrepresented at all levels of elected office. Worldwide, men's dominance in the realm of politics has also been the norm. To date, scholars have focused on supply-side and demand-side explanations of women's underrepresentation but differences in how men and women assess electoral risk (the risk involved in seeking political office) are not fully explained. To fill this gap, I explore how evolutionary theory offers insights into gendered differences in political ambition and the evaluation of electoral risk. Using the framework of life-history theory, I hypothesize that both cognitive and environmental factors in human evolution, particularly as they relate to sexual selection and social roles, have shaped the psychology of ambition in gendered ways affecting contemporary politics. Cognitive risk-assessment mechanisms evolving in the hominid line came to be expressed differently in females and males, in women and men. These gendered expressions plausibly reflect differentiable environmental pressures in the past and may help explain behaviors in and barriers to women's electoral political activity in the present. If so, then the success of efforts to increase such activity -or, regressively, to suppress it -may be better understood.Key words: Political ambition, gender differences, evolutionary theory, electoral risk assessment M ale officeholders are the norm in political representation both worldwide and in the United States in particular. Across the globe, gender parity in political representation is unusual, and instances of women's overrepresentation are extremely rare. 1 In the United States, women make up slightly more than half of the population and earned the right to vote and participate fully in the political process many decades ago. Nevertheless, in recent U.S. history, less than a quarter of state legislators have been women; women have held few state executive offices; and women have comprised less than 20 percent of the membership of the U.S. Congress. 2 Proponents of greater gender equality in U.S. political representation continue to wonder why more women do not run for or hold political office when so many of the societal and structural barriers to their participation have diminished. The leading explanations tend to focus on candidate emergence and cultural doi: 10.1017/pls.2016.13Correspondence: Jennie Sweet-Cushman, Department of History, Political Science, and International Studies, Chatham University, 0 Woodland Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15232. Email: jsweetcushman@chatham.edu and psychological factors that contribute to men and women having different levels of political ambition. 3,4 However, these theories do not address what I consider to be critical questions: What role does electoral risk play in political ambition, and can evolutionary theory provide insight into gendered differences in risk assessment and political ambition? I argue that the ...

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“…More specifically, this method creates a single effect size for a study with multiple effect sizes that share the same coding on a specific moderator. For example, Sell, Griffith, and Wilson (1993), in a single study, report two effects sizes based on mixed-sex interactions and one effect size based on same-sex interactions. When conducting the moderator analysis for same-sex versus mixed-sex interactions, we averaged the two mixed-sex effect sizes to create a single mixedsex effect size for this study.…”

Section: Overview Of Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Balliet

Macfarlan

et al. 2011

Psychological Bulletin

285

234

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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.

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Are Women More Cooperative Than Men in Social Dilemmas?

Cited by 64 publications

References 21 publications

Deconstructing the Myth of the Monolithic Male Athlete: A Qualitative Study of Men’s Participation in Athletics

Deconstructing the Myth of the Monolithic Male Athlete: A Qualitative Study of Men’s Participation in Athletics

Gender, risk assessment, and political ambition

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

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