A worker within a firm, or a researcher within the academia, is required to both cooperate with colleagues in team-projects and to compete with them for career progressions. Hence, within workplaces, individuals need to adapt when switching between tasks characterized by different levels of competitiveness and cooperativeness. In this paper, we experimentally investigate possible spillover effects on males’ and females’ cooperation measured by indefinitely repeated Prisoner’s Dilemmas, characterized distinguished by two different levels of the competitiveness-cooperativeness index (CCI, Demuynck et al., 2022). Additionally, as the importance placed on competitiveness might differently impacts males’ and females’ attitudes towards the task, in our Decomposition treatment we separately present its zero-sum component and its common interest component.
Besides supporting the efficacy of the CCI in measuring the competitiveness and cooperativeness of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, our results show that females are more likely than males to spill over their cooperative behaviour when switching from a low competitive environment to a high competitive one, with no significant effect of our choice architecture intervention.