Are men or women more cooperative?

For the most part, men and women are equally cooperative but this study found a few small, though consistent differences.

From the consistently great PsyBlog:

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.

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