Who wins in Co-Education Girls or Boys?
The psychological research on is boys or girls more
cooperative or not and the research says that boys edge out girls in single-sex
interactions, but women win in mixed-sex situations. Means in non co-education boys will rule and in the
co-education girls leads.
My guess before I read a new paper by Balliet et al.
(2011) was that there's no difference between men and women or maybe a slight
advantage for women. But according to the latest thinking that's not quite
right.
The debate over whether men or women cooperate more has
been going on for years. The research finds that men are more likely to help a
stranger and are better at cooperating in larger groups, while women are often
kinder, more agreeable and more supportive.
Still, the differences between the sexes are often
grossly exaggerated; men and women definitely don't come from different
planets.
So what Balliet et al. (2011) did was look across 50 years of research and hundreds of different studies to see what emerged. They
broke studies down by situations and they found that overall, when you averaged
everything out, there was little difference between men and women.
As ever, though, the devil is in the details, and they
teased out some somewhat counter-intuitive findings:
§ In single sex
interactions men are more cooperative than women. The difference is quite small
but emerges consistently when men are working with other men and women with
other women.
§ In mixed sex
interactions, though, women cooperate more than men. Again, the difference is
quite small but it's there, in study after study.
§ When working
together over time men are generally more cooperative than women. Once again
the difference is quite small.
What's going on here? There are a couple of theories:
§ When men and
women are in mixed sex groups they tend to act in more stereotypical ways
because of the presence of the opposite sex.
§ An evolutionary
perspective would suggest that men are showing off to women how dominant they
are in mixed sex groups, so this reduces their cooperation.
Whatever the reason, these findings fit in with much
other research. Generally the differences between men and women's social
behaviour are quite small. If you want to know how much a person is going to
cooperate with you forget about their gender and focus instead on their
personality.
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