This is a bit of a word-game really, the article could use some tabooing. While cooperation and competition are often seen as opposites, in reality any status-competition game has both, because one needs allies to win.
It is really a huge stretch to imply an fair outcome means a cooperative outcome means a cooperative mentality means an anti-competitive mentality.
If we want to interpret the experiment hugging the query as close as possible, we see an attitude of enforcing fairness or more properly standing up to an punishing people if they try to play unfair with you which is very, very close to what we consider traditionally masculine approach and does NOT indicate a non-competitive personality: would we really expect a highly competitive person to gladly accept and take unfair deals? Offer a sucker’s deal to a Clint Eastwood type and he will gladly take it? Surely not. What the experiment seems to confirm is that competitive drives can result in cooperative and fair overall outcomes—i.e. a modern version of the Fable of the Bees, it does not suggest that the mentality and approach of guys who rejected unfair offers was not competitive. It is the outcome that was fair and cooperative, not the drive.
This is a bit of a word-game really, the article could use some tabooing. While cooperation and competition are often seen as opposites, in reality any status-competition game has both, because one needs allies to win.
It is really a huge stretch to imply an fair outcome means a cooperative outcome means a cooperative mentality means an anti-competitive mentality.
If we want to interpret the experiment hugging the query as close as possible, we see an attitude of enforcing fairness or more properly standing up to an punishing people if they try to play unfair with you which is very, very close to what we consider traditionally masculine approach and does NOT indicate a non-competitive personality: would we really expect a highly competitive person to gladly accept and take unfair deals? Offer a sucker’s deal to a Clint Eastwood type and he will gladly take it? Surely not. What the experiment seems to confirm is that competitive drives can result in cooperative and fair overall outcomes—i.e. a modern version of the Fable of the Bees, it does not suggest that the mentality and approach of guys who rejected unfair offers was not competitive. It is the outcome that was fair and cooperative, not the drive.