Sex role and “cooperation” in the game of Chicken

Abstract

investigated with respect to their effect on the outcome (or series of outcomes), among them the personality and the sex of the experimental subjects. This paper concerns itself with sex role as it relates to choice behavior in one of the more common games of conflict, that of Chicken (Rapoport and Chammah, 1966). Research that has considered sex role, either as a primary or as an interacting variable affecting experimental game behavior, can be classified into two general categories-research in which subjects play against programmed opponents and research in which subjects play against each other. In the first category the evidence is mixed at 1. The author wishes to extend his thanks to Denis Carpio, who ran the experiments, and to James Emshoff for his collaboration throughout the study. The experiments were conducted while the author was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and were supported in part by the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. best. Using the Prisoner's Dilemma Bixenstine and Wilson (1963), Bixenstine, Potash, and Wilson (1963), McKeown, Gahagan, and Tedeschi (1967), and Tedeschi et al. (1968) found no significant sex/choice-behavior correlation. But Bixenstine, Chambers, and Wilson (1964) using an 80 percent random match program found that males were more likely to play cooperatively (avoid the dilemma in the Prisoner's Dilemma) than were females. Komorita (1965) on the other hand discovered that females were more likely to be cooperative against both a 50 percent and a 75 percent random matching program than were males.