Stereotypes and perceptions
Although differences in online behavior are often small or nonexistent, our stereotypes about gender loom large. Because gender is one of those few characteristics that is usually apparent online, it may dominate the impression more than it might in real life. Even though people can conceal it, they usually don't. In all of these studies of messages posted to the Internet, for example, there are always some people whose gender can't be deciphered from the content, but that number is rarely more than 10% or 15%, and often it is much lower.
What happens when you know very little about another person other than gender? Kimberly Matheson at McGill University conducted an ingenious study that isolated those stereotypes, making sure the behavior of the partner had nothing whatever to do with the way the subject was reacting. She created a programmed negotiator for her subjects to bargain with on a series of financial contracts in which each person's objective was to acquire as much money as possible without turning the partner into an enemy. Then she led her subjects to believe the "person" at the other end of the computer-mediated bargaining table was male, female, or of unknown gender. The programmed opponent was designed to be "firm but fair" in the sense that it was reasonably tolerant when the real subject failed to make concessions, but it refused to come to agreement until equity was achieved in the deal. She gathered data about each subject's impressions of their partner before the negotiations started, and then several times during the course of the bargaining session.
Stereotypes about males and females appeared, and both men and women showed them. Women who were told their partner was female expected "her" to be fair and cooperative. In contrast, men who thought their partner was male expected less fairness and cooperation from "him." As the negotiations wore on, and even though the programmed negotiator was doing the same thing regardless of what the subject had been told about its gender, the "female" partner was still viewed as more cooperative and less exploitative by the women subjects; the men thought their "male" counterparts were tougher competitors. Another interesting finding came from the men and women who were told nothing about the gender of their negotiating partner. They tended to rate the partner the same way the subjects were rating the imaginary male partner, as though the male stereotype is the "default."