Online misrepresentation erodes cooperation

What is it about?

This paper experimentally investigate whether giving people an opportunity to misrepresent their gender in 'social media-like' setting to others reduces cooperation in a variant of a prisoner’s dilemma game. Compared to treatments where either participants’ true genders are revealed to each other in a pair or no information on gender is given, the treatment effects of randomly selecting people to be allowed to misrepresent their gender on defection are positive, sizeable, and statistically significant. Allowing people to misrepresent their gender reduces the average cooperation rate by approximately 10–12 percentage points. While one explanation for the significant treatment effects is that participants who chose to misrepresent their gender in the treatment where they were allowed to do so defect substantially more, the potential of being matched with someone who could be misrepresenting their gender also caused people to defect more than usual as well. On average, individuals who chose to misrepresent their gender are around 32 percentage points more likely to defect than those in the blind and true gender treatments. Further analysis reveals that a large part of the effect is driven by women who misrepresented in same-sex pairs and men who misrepresented in mixed-sex pairs. We conclude that even small short-term opportunities to misrepresent one’s gender can potentially be extremely harmful to later human cooperation.

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Photo by Dainis Graveris on Unsplash

Photo by Dainis Graveris on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Our study highlights the potential dangers of giving people the opportunity to misrepresent themselves online. Comparing between a scenario where people's true identity — at least in terms of gender identity — is publicly known, giving people the opportunity to misrepresent themselves significantly increase the likelihood that people will behave in a more dishonest way. We conclude that there may be some benefits to allowing people to to verify themselves on social network platforms.