Sex differences in children's formation of exclusionary alliances under scarce resource conditions

Conclusions that human males behave more competitively than females have been tempered by recent findings that the two sexes use differing competitive strategies. Theoretically, mammalian males generally gain more than females from using riskier strategies, whereas females have more to lose. Females therefore should compete using less risky strategies. Research with humans suggests that one of these may involve alliance and coalition formation. These diminish risk yet exact a cost in terms of payoffs, suggesting that they may elicit sex-differentiated patterns of use. We examined the hypothesis that early sex-differentiated patterns would appear in which human females would form exclusionary alliances under scarce resource conditions more than males would, whereas males would use individualistic strategies more than females would. To test the hypothesis, 15 female and 14 male triads of 4-year-old children were observed under plentiful and scarce resource conditions. Under scarce resource conditions only, females formed more exclusionary alliances than males did, whereas males engaged in more individualistic competition than females did. Discussion focuses on factors that should predict sex differences in the use of coalitions.