We make a lot of joint decisions on a daily basis. Whether choosing to buy a car or house with your spouse, making business decisions with your coworkers, or simply deciding where to have dinner with a friend, we constantly find ourselves having to make choices with others. But when choosing jointly, are we likely to make the same choices we would if we were alone? Our research suggests the answer may depend on the gender composition of the group.

Marketers have long known that, when given a set of choices, individuals tend to choose the middle ground, the compromise option. For instance, given a range of cars that differ on fuel efficiency and interior design, consumers tend to prefer the option that gives them a little bit of both attributes. While the car with the most fuel efficiency (but worst interior design) or the one with the best interior design (but the lowest mileage per gallon) might be hard to justify, the car that has average fuel efficiency and interior design seems reasonable and thus takes the lion’s share of choice. This is called the compromise effect, or the “goldilocks effect” or “extremeness aversion.” Because it is one of the most robust effects in the decision-making literature, it’s often used by marketers to shift peoples’ preferences in predictable ways.

We wanted to see whether this tendency to opt for the moderate option still holds true when people make joint decisions. Our research, recently published in the Journal of Consumer Research, suggests that the effect does not always hold up.

In our studies involving more than 1,200 participants, we paired some people in decision-making teams of two (these could be two males, a male and a female, or two females) and had others make decisions individually. We asked participants to make a series of choices, where they could select either extreme items in a set (for example, a restaurant that was very expensive but had a very short wait time, or was very inexpensive and had a very long wait time) or moderate “compromise” alternatives (both price and wait time fall between the two extremes). The partners in the decision-making duos had to come to a single joint decision, meaning that both of them would have to live with the outcome of their choice.

What we found surprised us. Across many different groupings of participants, stimuli, and procedures, the outcome was the same: Women are always more likely to prefer the middle option, whether alone or in a pair (either with another woman or with a man). However, pairs of men tend to choose extreme options, far more so than when men are deciding with other women or when men are deciding alone. For pairs of men, the compromise effect did not occur.

Consider how this might apply to other situations. If a father and a son are choosing a car together, they’ll likely go for the one providing the most fuel efficiency or the one offering the best interior design, instead of settling for a middle alternative that offers a little bit of both. If two men are deciding on corporate strategy together, they may be more likely to go all-in for one approach or take some cards off the table completely. If a woman is involved in the decision making, though, moderate paths are more likely.

Why does this happen? Here, we drew from recent work in social psychology. Psychological research has suggested that masculinity is considered to be precarious, requiring constant proof and validation in social interactions. Evolutionary theories suggest that the precarious nature of manhood is a result of evolved adaptations to an environment, in which men had to compete with other men for both resources and partners. Our work suggests that present-day vestiges of this pattern emerge in joint decisions: Men making decisions together feel driven to take actions that are maximally different from feminine norms, which prioritize moderation, and maximally similar to masculine norms, which prioritize extremity. So when men make decisions together, they signal their masculinity by choosing things that are extreme, which attenuates the compromise effect in male decision-making pairs.

Historically, femininity hasn’t been found to be as precarious. That may be why, without the gender-signaling needs of men, the compromise effect emerges in the decisions of two female partners — and why, in contrast to men, women act the same together as they would alone. Furthermore, because a female presence makes the masculinity of men in male-female pairs obvious, in these pairings we observe compromise behavior consistent with that of individual decision makers and female-female pairs.

Fortunately, men who want to reach moderation do have options. We found that if male pairs are given the opportunity to signal their masculinity prior to the decision making (for example, by jointly choosing a stereotypically male magazine as a reward for their study participation), their tendency to avoid compromise alternatives dissolves. Something as simple as this prompted our male decision-making pairs to show preferences for compromise options that were similar to female pairs’.

Our work has significant practical implications for marketers, managers, and consumers. Since the compromise effect is usually used by marketers for assortment planning, product positioning, and to shift consumers’ choices in predictable ways, marketers need to understand whether their target audience is likely to make individual or joint decisions about the product or service they offer, and they need to consider the gender composition of decision-making pairs.

So if a company wants to push sales toward a particular option, and they expect their target customers to primarily be men making decisions together, then it’s better to make the product or service an extreme option rather than a more moderate one. For instance, if two men are choosing a movie to see together, they are likely to choose an extreme option (e.g., pure comedy or pure adventure); thus, positioning the movie as an extreme option should be very effective in this case. By contrast, pairs of women may choose a movie that falls between genres, having both comedy and adventure elements. Further, if a largely female audience is expected, the theater can use the compromise effect to increase revenues. For example, if the theater eliminated the small size of popcorn and beverages and included an extra large option, it would make the large item the middle choice, and perhaps encourage more women to purchase it.

Managers entrusted with building successful teams in the workplace might also benefit from our findings. If firms wish to foster more extreme decisions, creating male-male decision-making teams may promote their objective to a greater extent than relying on individual decisions. For example, an individual fund manager might create a more moderate mix of risk and reward in his portfolio, but if male fund managers work in pairs, they may be likely to create more-extreme portfolios, with high risk and high return. Consequently, in order to make sure that moderate options are considered, managers could (it should go without saying) include more women in the decision making or keep employee decisions private, so that males are not punished for suggesting actions that involve compromise.

Our findings also suggest that men and women may have very different approaches to negotiation. Consider salary negotiations as a type of joint decision — two people have to agree on one outcome. Men negotiating with one another would be more likely to start at extreme high and low numbers, and struggle to work their way to a compromise. Women, by contrast, may try to begin with a number they feel is reasonable — but in fact may leave money on the table if they don’t consider opening with a more extreme offer. In these cases, both men and women need to be aware of their tendencies, and make sure they’re really thinking about the reasoning behind their behavior rather than just defaulting to the moderate or extreme position that feels most comfortable for them, given their negotiating partner.