Gender and Cooperation in the Laboratory

A long and strong research tradition in social psychology has attempted to find out what factors affect the frequencies of cooperative versus competitive responses by having subjects play simple mixed motive games, e.g. Prisoner's Dilemma, in laboratory conditions. Several early studies failed to find any relationship with gender, whereas others found male pairs to cooperate more than female pairs, most notably Rapoport & Chammah (1965), using the Prisoner's Dilemma game. These results are in apparent contradiction to the general thesis that women tend to be more cooperative than men. A re-analysis from a feminist perspective is made in order to throw light on the seeming contradiction stemming from the laboratory studies. Two types of feminist analysis are applied, one from a more liberal and equality-oriented perspective and one from a more radical feminist perspective. The greater cooperativeness of males may be interpreted as an artifact of the methodology used. Men do not cooperate more than women, but choose the cooperative strategy when that is the winning one and a competitive strategy when that strategy wins. An analysis from this equality-oriented feminist perspective may show that men are bent on winning the game and use the strategy most suited to that purpose. Analysis from a more radical feminist perspective criticizes this type of context-stripped experiment to measure such a complex phenomenon as cooperation and shows that women tend to find the whole laboratory situation uninteresting and are more concerned with personal aspects of the actors in the game than with the game itself.