You Think Like a Girl

by Michelle Starr

“Female players are a little more emotional, and the male players are a little more competitive,” says Cedric Anen, another Caltech researcher. Quartz adds that the research could give insight into how couples approach trust- and risk-based situations in the real world, perhaps showing how men and women “balance each other out and make good decisions together.” It might also explain the fact that women second-guess themselves more often than men, and wait impatiently for the phone to ring after a romantic encounter.

The gender-specific traits—something Quartz and his team didn’t expect to find, but now plan to study further—revealed themselves more and more as the game wore on. At the end, asked to guess whether they had been playing a man or a woman, men said they suspected a female opponent when the other player punished them for taking too much money. Women believed they were interacting with a man when the other player acted “computer-like.” Both were right 73 percent of the time.