PONE-D-22-25168Large Losses from Little Lies: Strategic Gender Misrepresentation and CooperationPLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

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Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Partly

Reviewer #3: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: N/A

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Summary of the paper

This paper investigates the role of mispresenting gender in determining cooperation in social dilemma. The authors recruit subjects from three different samples and test their idea with a golden ball game experiment. Using four different treatment, the authors found that randomly allowing participants to misrepresent their gender to the other player reduces the aggregate cooperation level for the entire treatment group, and individuals who chose to misrepresent their gender are more likely to defect than those in the control group. The research question is clear and interesting, and the design and implementation of the experiment is reasonable. However, the robustness of the finding is not convincing.

Major comments:

1. The main finding of the paper is that “randomly allowing participants to misrepresent their gender to the other player reduces the aggregate cooperation level for the entire treatment group by approximately 12 percentage points”. The crucial argument is not supported by the data. First, “Randomly assigned opportunity to misrepresent gender” should be one treatment, whether one received the opportunity could not be seen as a treatment design. According to the data, the overall effect of this treatment is not different from the control (31.9% vs. 34.9% steal). Second, even we allow this split, the subsample of “Randomly assigned opportunity to misrepresent gender” is only significant at a 10% level in only the regression that including many other factors (model (3) of table 2). This effect is not significant in model (1). The “approximately 12 percentage points” is based on the coefficient of model (3) while not real overall effect. Third, the authors did not report average date on treatment level but we check the data and did not find any significant difference between treatments. Thus, the main findings are not convincing.

2. The second important finding is “individuals who chose to misrepresent their gender are 32 percentage points more likely to defect than those in the control group”. The problems here are: first, the research question is the impact of mispresenting gender on cooperation. It is not surprise to find those who prefer to lie for their gender also tend to steal in the game. They are just those bad apples. More interesting question is how this affect the behavior of others. Unfortunately, I did not find any analyses on the interactive behaviors between pairs. Second, Even you would like to compare the decision of those who choose to mispresent, you should compare them to those who choose not the mispresent while not to the control treatment.

3. The findings are not in line with the hypotheses. The authors propose that “there may be less incentive for women in mixed-sex pairs to strategically misrepresent their gender to their partner, considering that men in same sex pairs are ones with the most negative expectation about each other’s behaviour in a social dilemma interaction”. However, 10 were females in mixed-sex pairs chose to misrepresent their gender, which is not different with other conditions.

Minor comments:

1. The study use the Golden Balls game but not the prisoner’s dilemma to study cooperation and justify this with “many of the students would have recently learned about the classic form of the prisoner’s dilemma”. It should not be a reason for a study. Why do not you choose samples who did not learn prisoner’s dilemma. Besides, the data suggest that only 7% subjects were from economics.

2. The experiment allowed communication before decisions. This design seems meaningless to the research question. The authors did not justify why you use this design and did nor provide further analyses for this. In addition, the player can learn whether the other side break the agreement from their payoff. So the agreement is not “unverifiable”.

3. The authors did not clearly present their treatment settings. For example, in second paragraph of P.13, the explanation of the three available conditions in randomly assigned gender treatment is confusing.

4. Several writings of the paper are not precise: such as the expression of “was slightly less than 10”, “the average steal rate was less than 50%”. Why do not directly report the exact figure.

5. The paper also lacks a sufficient review of the related literature about lying/cheating, social identity, and social preference.

6. To support the motivation and hypotheses of the study, it is expected the authors could do further measures such as the above mentioned interaction between pairs and subjects’ beliefs.

Reviewer #2: In this study, the authors studied a very interesting question: what would the ability and choice of misrepresenting one's gender affect their propensity to cooperate in social dilemma setting. This is a well-motivated problem especially in the internet era where most online inter-personal interactions are made behind anonymity and self-selected gender identity. To avoid prior knowledge to the prisoner's dilemma problem, they choose the Goldern Balls game, a variant of the prisoner's dilemma and collected experimental results from two countries. Results suggest that the the choice to misrepresent genders in Goldern Balls can lead to significantly more defective behaviors than the control group.

Overall, the experimental setting is relatively comprehensive, and so are the results. The hypotheses are logical after the well-written introduction of related work. The description of the experimental settings and methodologies, however, can benefit from writing improvements.

P9. The description of the four treatments (and later separated into six treatments) are confusing. How are "4b. Was not randomly assigned gender" and "3a. Did not receive a random opportunity to misrepresent gender" different from "1. Blind"? Is it the case that 3a or 4b participants know that their opponents can be gender-misrepresented or randomly assigned gender, but they cannot?

And in Figure 2, abbreviations are used to indicated results, while here in method description, these abbreviations are never introduced or used. Please standardize them.

P12-13. The different conditions are mixed together with the grouping based on these participants responses. It might be much easier for the readers to understand to use a table where the columns and rows factorize these different conditions and responses, and put their corresponding numbers (e.g. number of people who choose to misrepresent, number of people who defects etc.) in it.

P13. "The other half were told that the other player was allowed to misrepresent their gender but may or may not take that opportunity" -- for the other half, are they simply not told this, or are they explicitly told that the other player are forbidden from misrepresenting their gender. This can make a difference, because they might assume the other player are also allowed to misrepresent even if they are not told so.

Following the previous point, if they are simply not told anything. Perhaps an experimental condition can better understand this effect, where that they are explicitly told the other opponent's gender is true.

P13. "The other half were told that the other player was allowed to misrepresent their gender but may or may not take that opportunity. Of those who were given the opportunity, 45 took it and misrepresented their gender to the other player, while 121 received the opportunity but chose not to misrepresent. Hence, the compliance rate is around 27%." -- how do the compliance rates differ for those who are told that their opponents can misrepresent vs. who are told that their opponents cannot.

P13. Unlike in the misrepresentation choice setting above, in the random assignment setting, "In both conditions, the opposing player was told that their opponent’s gender information may not be accurate." Why the difference? Would it make more sense to also consider a setting where their are told that their opponent are not randomly assigned?

The mathematically notations seem to be messed up. There are many empty blocks of rectangles in place of where some symbols should be at (e.g. P12-14). Please fix them.

P14. How are the linear function fitted? Please describe.

Last but not least, there is an effect that the authors didn't study, that may offer an alternative explanation to the results. In the background section, the authors hypothesize that the participants, if given the choice to misrepresent their genders, might take advantage of it by choosing the gender that minimize their opponents' negative expection about themselves. However, this is under the assumption that all the participants are explicitly aware of the gender effect on the social dilemma interactions (e.g. women would have a strong preference to signal to other women that they are kind; and men would cooperate more if their opponents are women). In reality, however, these knowledge are not necessarily conscious to the participants. Therefore, the set of experiments could be additionally separated into two conditions, one where the participants are given a fact sheet of these gender-related cooperation preferences, and one where they aren't. It would be quite interesting to understand this effect.

In summary, the referee would like to see an improvement of the method description and additional experimental results that considered the effect of the awareness of gender preferences, and the opponent's experimental settings. Other than these, the research can illuminate important insights on critical real-world interactions in our digital life.

Reviewer #3: Summary

The paper entitled Large Losses from Little Lies: Strategic Gender Misrepresentation and Cooperation investigates an interesting question on cooperation with the possibility of misrepresenting one’s gender. The lab and the field experiment study provide large-sample and multinational evidence that confirm the harmful impact of the available deception on gender. This paper extends mixed previews findings on gender differences in cooperation and consider gender stereotype. Overall, this paper is interesting and helpful in understanding the relationship between small lies on gender and cooperation. However, I have some concerns which may help during the revision.

Major Comments

1. What are the purpose and settings of the fourth treatment- Randomly assigned gender? Does this treatment involve deception on subjects? Even if not, I think this design is counterfactual and unreasonable. It is almost impossible to force people to misrepresent their gender in reality. So, not surprisingly, the result of the treatment is disappointing. By contrast, the treatments in regard of hidden gender or gender composition of populations make more sense.

2. There might be some exciting findings in the verbal and anonymous communication before the game. Did the participants have the chance to send gender messages in this part? If so, these messages might be part of the effect of gender misrepresentation or bias in the estimation. Secondly, since this communication is unstructured and participants can talk about whatever they want, does the text data reflects some interesting behavior pattern? For instance, did the participants misrepresenting gender grab this chance to convince their partner to believe them? The authors should consider digging deep into the text data.

3. The consistency between lying behaviors and stealing/splitting behavior should be checked. Some participants might lie to take advantage of stereotypes. However, there might be some participants who were afraid of defection. Once they get the chance to misrepresent, they might lie about their gender to protect themselves from others' defection. This type of participant might be more willing to cooperate. The authors should analyze the different behavior patterns further.

4. One of the most interesting results is the different strategies used by male and female. Which strategy is closer to the rational expectation or which is the more successful strategy? Is there any deeper psychological explanation for this result?

5. Last but not least, the regression coefficients of most treatments are not significant, which means the impacts are small statistically. To make conclusions more convincing, maybe more explanations are needed. What’s more, the analysis on mechanism is somewhat too simple and superficial, it should be more in-depth, for example, including people’s beliefs which are crucial to the results.

Minor comments

1. There are several mistakes in the paper. In Introduction section, (p4 line2) "a variant" repeated for 2 times. In Empirical strategy section, p14, paragraph 4, line 3 and 4, letters of the equation failed to be shown, perhaps due to the document export problems.

2. I suggest adding some non-parametric statistical hypothesis tests before skipping into a probit regression, which may help explore differences between two treatments and focus on the significant outcomes. Figure 2 alone is insufficient to clarify the overall treatment effect of four conditions.

3. Wilcoxon Signed Rank in the second paragraph on Page 15 is misused. As mentioned above, the Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test is the test that is used in a between-subject design. It should be checked

4. The reference list are not completed. For example, “Kim (2020)” in the page 14 is not included in the references.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Shuguang Jiang

Reviewer #2: Yes: Baihan Lin

Reviewer #3: Yes: Yefeng Chen

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Submitted filename: Referee Report.docx

Large Losses from Little Lies: Strategic Gender Misrepresentation and Cooperation

PONE-D-22-25168R1

Dear Dr. Powdthavee,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Luo-Luo Jiang, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #4: (No Response)

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #4: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors have sloved most of my concerns except my comment on literature. The mispresenting of gender is a kind of cheating\\lying behavior. So I believe some literature on lying should be related to this study.

Reviewer #2: The referee would like to thank the authors for the revision and response to the reviews. The revision and response address most of my concerns.

Reviewer #4: This work discusses an interesting question regarding gender differences in human cooperation and explores its extended social preference through empirical text. The kernel of the experiments is the gender misrepresentation of self-identity in a dilemma game, referring to a game-theoretic system, and the mispresented information is based on intended action. By looking through the revised version of the manuscript, I think the authors have well addressed the critical issues raised by other reviewers. The experimental assumptions and methods adopted are reasonable and reliable, and the conclusion is robust. However, I’ve noticed several points that make me draw the conclusion that the MS with the current style cannot be interim accepted, despite I embrace with a positive feeling.

1. In the Background and hypotheses Section, the author mentioned one leading mechanism named indirect reciprocity, which can promote the evolution of cooperation among human society. The author states that the establishment of indirect reciprocity is based on the interactive pair or group interaction. However, is this also related to the Golden Ball game used in their experiment?

2. Also, in B&H Section, the authors specifically mentioned indirect reciprocity and punishment mechanism. So, this kind of costly punishment can be denoted as direct reciprocity. If the author wants to briefly introduce the potential mechanisms to promote cooperation, they may refer to some classic papers, like Science (314) pp. 1560-1563. (It does not mean you have to cite this paper.)

3. The authors argue that gender differences are one of social preference. Many papers have been released discussing the influence of social preference on the evolution of cooperation during the past decades. They may explain this in more detail.

4. I noticed that some of their math formulas have boxes (page 15), and some do not (page 22). Please make sure the formulas are consistent.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Shuguang Jiang

Reviewer #2: Yes: Baihan Lin

Reviewer #4: No

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