Large losses from little lies: Strategic gender misrepresentation and cooperation

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 substantially more, the potential of being matched with someone who could be misrepresenting their gender also caused people to defect more than usual as well. On average, individuals who chose to misrepresent their gender are around 32 percentage points more likely to defect than those in the blind and true gender treatments. Further analysis reveals that a large part of the effect is driven by women who misrepresented in same-sex pairs and men who misrepresented in mixed-sex pairs. We conclude that even small short-term opportunities to misrepresent one's gender can potentially be extremely harmful to later human cooperation.

Automated summary

This paper explores the impact of deceiving others about one's gender on cooperation in the Golden Balls game, a variant of the prisoner's dilemma game. The results show that allowing individuals to misrepresent their gender leads to a significant reduction in cooperation, with average defection rates decreasing by approximately 10-12 percentage points. The study also suggests that the effect is particularly pronounced among women who misrepresented their gender in same-sex pairs and men who misrepresented in mixed-sex pairs. These findings highlight the potential harm of even small opportunities to deceive others about one's gender on future cooperation.