From a young age we’re taught about the importance of cooperation. Getting things done often takes teamwork — and when teams work well together, they are usually more successful.

But cooperation is not a skill that comes easily — and as most of us know, men and women often approach that task very differently, whether it’s a project at work, at school, or at home.

Women cooperate more when they’re being watched by other women. Men tend to cooperate better in large groups.

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There’s now science to back up the reasons for this.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine tracked the brain activity of people asked to cooperate with a partner. They found that males and females had very different patterns of brain activity during that process.

The new findings, they believe, could offer clues into how cooperative behavior may have evolved differently between males and females. That information, in turn, might also eventually help researchers — as well as couples and coworkers — develop new ways to enhance cooperative behavior.

“It’s not that either males or females are better at cooperating or can’t cooperate with each other,” said the study’s senior author, Allan Reiss, M.D., a professor of psychiatry, behavioral sciences, and radiology. “Rather, there’s just a difference in how they’re cooperating.”

Previous behavioral studies have found that women cooperate more when they’re being watched by other women, men tend to cooperate better in large groups, and while a pair of men might cooperate better than a pair of women, in a mixed-sex pair the woman tends to be the more cooperative of the two.

Theories have circulated about why — but the brain science on this has been scarce.

“A vast majority of what we know comes from very sterile, single-person studies done in an MRI machine,” said Joseph Baker, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford and the lead author of the study.

Stanford researchers instead used a technique called hyperscanning. It involves simultaneously recording the activity in two people’s brains while they interact.

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The 222 participants in the study were each assigned a partner. Pairs consisted of two males, two females, or a male and a female. Partners could see each other but were instructed not to talk. Instead, they were asked to press a button when a circle on the computer screen changed color. The goal was to press the button simultaneously with their partner.

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

“We developed this test because it was simple, and you could easily record responses,” said Reiss. “You have to start somewhere.” It isn’t modeled after any particular real-world cooperative task, he said.

On average, male-male pairs performed better than female-female pairs at timing their button pushes more closely. However, the brain activity in both same-sex pairs was highly synchronized during the activity, meaning they had high levels of “interbrain coherence.”

Surprisingly, though, male-female pairs did as well as male-male pairs at the cooperation task, even though they didn’t show coherence.

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“This study is pretty exploratory,” Baker said. “This certainly isn’t probing cooperation in all its manifestations.”

There could be other cooperative tasks, for instance, in which female-female pairs best males.

“There are a lot of parts of the brain we didn’t assess,” Reiss said, noting that interbrain coherence may have been present in other regions of the brain not examined during the task. The new findings were published online in Scientific Reports.

The research is ongoing — and because it is such an important life skill, scientists are even looking into the use of biofeedback to teach cooperation.

“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.”