Department of Economics, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94117, USA.
Center for the Philosophy of Freedom, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2023 Jan 16;378(1868):20210440. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2021.0440. Epub 2022 Nov 28.
The lower female competitiveness often found in economic experiments presents a puzzle. If accumulating wealth and reaching high status affords women essential benefits for themselves and their children, why do women appear less competitive? By looking at behavioural strategies from a cooperative breeding perspective, we propose that women may have evolved an adaptation to strategically suppress competitiveness to elicit cooperation for the benefit of raising offspring. To support this idea, we review the literature that shows that women's behaviour is, in general, more reactive than men's to the social conditions of the different games. In particular, we focus on our experimental work where we show that women are not less competitive than men once the games evoke a parenting frame (by substituting cash with rewards that could benefit the participants' offspring), a gender-typical one (by using vouchers for prizes acceptable as domain of female interests), or include a prosocial option (by allowing winners to share some of the gains with losers). We conclude that, for women, nurturing the potential for cooperation intertwines with competitiveness to produce a complex, adaptive female social strategy. This article is part of the theme issue 'Cooperation among women: evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives'.
在经济实验中经常发现女性竞争力较低，这构成了一个谜题。如果积累财富和达到高地位为女性及其子女带来了重要的好处，那么为什么女性的竞争力看起来较低呢？通过从合作繁殖的角度来看待行为策略，我们提出女性可能已经进化出一种适应性，以策略性地抑制竞争力，以引发合作，从而有利于养育后代。为了支持这个想法，我们回顾了文献，表明女性的行为通常比男性对不同游戏的社会条件更具反应性。特别是，我们专注于我们的实验工作，其中我们表明，一旦游戏唤起了养育框架（用可以使参与者的后代受益的奖励代替现金）、性别典型框架（用可作为女性利益领域的奖品券）或包含亲社会选项（允许赢家与输家分享部分收益），女性就不会比男性更缺乏竞争力。我们得出结论，对于女性来说，培养合作潜力与竞争力交织在一起，形成了一种复杂的、适应性的女性社会策略。本文是“女性之间的合作：进化和跨文化视角”主题特刊的一部分。
