ArticleScientific reports2016
Men increase contributions to a public good when under sexual competition.
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Spillover effects of competition outcome on future risky cooperation.Scientific reports · 2023Trial
- Kill them with kindness: preliminary evidence for women's competitive altruism.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Interplay of polymorphisms in sex hormone receptors and facial sexual differentiation in shaping prosocial behavior.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Ethics trumps resources in women's and men's evaluations of potential mates and competitors.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Facial threat affects trust more strongly than facial attractiveness in women than it does in men.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Gender-based pairings influence cooperative expectations and behaviours.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- The Male Warrior Hypothesis: Testosterone-related Cooperation and Aggression in the Context of Intergroup Conflict.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- To help or punish in the face of unfairness: men and women prefer mutually-beneficial strategies over punishment in a sexual selection context.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Why humans cooperate in large groups and with non-kin remains a puzzle for researchers across the natural and social sciences. Investigating whether cooperation is sexually selected could contribute to an understanding of the evolution of human cooperation. Competition for access to mates could indeed select for cooperation. Using controlled laboratory experiments, we analyse whether and how the sex composition of a social environment, testosterone level, and relationship status affect contributions to a public good. The results show that variation in sex composition alters the amount of money that single men (but not men in a couple or women) contribute to a public good. Notably, in line with the competitive helping hypothesis, awareness of the presence of a woman leads to larger contributions by single men, most likely by triggering their competitiveness to be the most cooperative man in the group. However, we find no link between basal testosterone level and cooperativeness. We argue that men, notably single men, adopt cooperative behaviours as a signalling strategy in the context of mate choice and hence that cooperation is partly sexually selected. Our findings highlight the need to consider sexual selection as an additional mechanism for cooperation.
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