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Levelling as a Female-Biased Competitive Tactic

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Abstract

Direct contests occur more frequently between men than between women. This produces the conclusion that men are more competitive than women. However, no sex differences have been found in other more indirect competitive tactics such as self-promotion and reputation derogation. Qualitative evidence further suggests that one competitive tactic, levelling, may be more commonly used by girls and women than by boys and men. Levelling initially was defined as occurring when several lower-ranked men physically overpowered a higher-ranked man. When institutional support backs equality, however, levelling can be effectively employed by a lower-ranked individual against a higher-ranked individual. Qualitative evidence with humans indicates that beginning in early childhood and continuing through adolescence, individual levelling is used by girls and women more than by boys and men. To empirically test whether individual levelling is more common among women than men, we modified a popular economic game to include a levelling option. In a pre-registered study, we asked 252 women and 258 men from four developed world regions to play the game for monetary compensation three times: with an equal-performing, higher-performing, and lower-performing partner. In each game, participants chose which tactic they wanted to employ: a winner-take-all contest, levelling, or working alone. Rational payoff-maximizing decisions should lead more participants to choose contests with lower-performing partners and to select levelling with higher-performing partners. No sex differences occurred in choice of contests with lower-performing partners, but more women than men employed levelling with higher-performing partners, supporting our hypothesis. Despite sex-biased preferences for competitive tactics, overall no sex differences arose in payoff maximizing decisions.

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Data Availability and Materials

The pre-registration, data, and complete instructions that participants read are available on the OSF website https://osf.io/jk6qf/.

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Funding

Funding was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant # 24753 to Henry Markovits.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 11 Divinity Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    Joyce F. Benenson

  2. Département de Psychologie, Université du Québec à Montréal, 200 Rue Sherbrooke Ouest, QC, H3C 3P8, Montréal, Canada

    Henry Markovits

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  1. Joyce F. Benenson
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  2. Henry Markovits
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Contributions

Joyce Benenson conceptualized the study, devised the measures, and wrote the initial version of the manuscript; Henry Markovits wrote the code, conducted the study, and ran the statistical analyses; both authors revised the manuscript and agreed to the final version.

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Correspondence to Joyce F. Benenson.

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Approval was obtained from the Research Ethics Board at the Université du Québec à Montreal. The procedures used in this study adhere to the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Benenson, J.F., Markovits, H. Levelling as a Female-Biased Competitive Tactic. Evolutionary Psychological Science 9, 270–282 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-023-00355-2

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