Large losses from little lies: Strategic gender misrepresentation and cooperation.

ABSTRACT: This paper investigates the possibility that a small deceptive act of misrepresenting one's gender to others reduces cooperation in the Golden Balls game, a variant of a prisoner's dilemma game. Compared to treatments where either participants' true genders are revealed to each other in a pair or no information on gender is given, the treatment effects of randomly selecting people to be allowed to misrepresent their gender on defection are positive, sizeable, and statistically significant. Allowing people to misrepresent their gender reduces the average cooperation rate by approximately 10-12 percentage points. While one explanation for the significant treatment effects is that participants who chose to misrepresent their gender in the treatment where they were allowed to do so defect subs

SUBMITTER: Drouvelis M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9994690 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature