Males and Females Process Cooperation Differently in the Brain, Study Finds

And there was no “interbrain coherence” when males and females tried to cooperate with each other.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine conducted a new study that delved into the ways males and females cooperate, finding that the genders approach the task differently, which is reflected by their brain activity.

222 participants were recruited for the research and assigned a partner. Partner sets were either male-male, female-female, or male-female. The partners were asked to sit across from each other and complete a task together, but without conversing. The volunteers were instructed to press a button when a circle on a computer screen changed color, and the goal was to press the button simultaneously with their partner.

After each try, the partners were told who had pressed the button sooner and how much sooner, and they had 40 tries to get their timing as close as possible.

To measure the brain activity during the task, the researchers used a technique called hyperscanning. Hyperscanning simultaneously records the brain activity as two people interact, and the researchers used near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), in which probes are attached to a person’s head to record brain activity. This enabled the volunteers to sit upright and interact more naturally than an MRI scan would allow.

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According to the research findings, which have been published online today (June 8) in the journal Scientific Reports, on average, the male-male pairs outperformed the female-female pairs at syncing the button pushes more closely. Still, in both same-sex pairs, the researchers observed highly synchronized brain activity, indicating high levels of “interbrain coherence.”

"Within same-sex pairs, increased coherence was correlated with better performance on the cooperation task," lead author Joseph Baker, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford, said in a press release. "However, the location of coherence differed between male-male and female-female pairs."

In females, the interbrain coherence was displayed in the right temporal cortex, which is involved in processing visual memories, language comprehension, and emotional associations. The males, on the other hand, exhibited the interbrain coherence in the right inferior prefrontal cortex, which has been shown to enable proper decision-making in changing situations by inhibiting inherent response tendencies, according to previous research.

Interestingly, the male-female pairs performed as well as the male-male pairs at the cooperation task, but they didn’t show the interbrain coherence.

"It's not that either males or females are better at cooperating or can't cooperate with each other," senior author Allan Reiss, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of radiology, clarified in the release. "Rather, there's just a difference in how they're cooperating."

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The researchers note that they developed the button-test because it was simple and could easily record responses, but it’s not modeled after any particular real-world cooperative tasks. Further, there were some parts of the brain that weren’t assessed in the study, so interbrain coherence could have been present in other regions that weren’t examined.

"This study is pretty exploratory," Baker said. "This certainly isn't probing cooperation in all its manifestations." For instance, there might be other cooperative tasks in which female-female pairs perform better than males.

The researchers plan to continue studying what underlies cooperation in the brain, hoping to gather results that could help explain how cooperation evolved in humans.

Further, they hope the results could be helpful for those who struggle to interact with others. "There are people with disorders like autism who have problems with social cognition," said Baker. "We're absolutely hoping to learn enough information so that we might be able to design more effective therapies for them."

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