According to common stereotypes, while men are the more competitive gender, women are more cooperative. However, the findings of a new study beg to differ. Researchers from Aalto University in Finland found that while males did enjoy competition more than cooperation, females enjoyed both competition and cooperation equally.
"Although there is a lot of research on gender differences, nobody has studied the emotions - the physiological mechanism that steers our behavior - of competitive and cooperative activities in males and females before. This gives a better insight into why people behave the way they do. You may unconsciously give false information about your motivations, but your body doesn't lie," Matias Kivikangas, a researcher in the research group, said in a press statement.
For the study, researchers used cooperative and competitive digital games to test the physiological responses to competitive and cooperative play to gauge how males and females are motivated to behave in these situations.
"Our results suggest that parts of the common stereotypes are untrue, at least in that women are not enjoying cooperation any more than competition. And it seems that the fact that men do enjoy competition more than cooperation might actually be a consequence from gender expectations rather than innate differences," the study authors said.
"Neither males or females experienced notable differences in negative emotions, indicating that only positive emotions are relevant in motivating competitive behavior. However, separate studies with other activities should be carried out as well, because I'd suspect that competition that the individual has not chosen themselves might elicit different emotional reactions," Kivikangas added.
The findings were published online in the science journal PLOS ONE. This study was partly supported by Finnish graduate school for User-Centered Technology. Experiment 1 of this research was funded by EU under the project "FUGA," and Experiment 2 was funded by Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation grant "Next Media."
