Despite popular conceptions about the hormone testosterone, in women, at least, the substance actually may promote fair, conciliatory behavior, researchers say.
But the myths about testosterone are so powerful that women in a study started acting less fairly if they thought they had received a dose of it, whether they had or not.
Such are the findings of a study appearing in the Dec. 8 advance online issue of the research journal Nature.
Testosterone is often called the “male” hormone and is popularly associated with aggression. Women have some testosterone also, though.
Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and colleagues set up a bargaining game in which female participants were given a pill either of testosterone or of a neutral substance, called a placebo.
Those that received testosterone showed a “substantial increase in fair bargaining behaviour,” leading to better social interactions, the researchers wrote. But women who thought that they received testosterone, whether or not they actually did, “behaved much more unfairly” than those who thought that they received placebo.
So, the negative, antisocial connotation of increasing testosterone levels seems to be strong enough to induce negative social behaviour even when the biological result is actually the opposite, the scientists remarked.
Evidence from animal studies does show that testosterone causes aggression toward other members of the species, Fehr and colleagues wrote. Popular wisdom tends to assume humans work the same way. But it has been unclear whether this is correct.
Studies have indeed found that male and female prisoners with violent histories have higher salivary testosterone levels than nonviolent prisoners, the researchers noted. But this does not show that the testosterone actually caused the violence.
A competing idea, they observed, is that testosterone motivates people to seek high social status. Depending on the situation, they may try to achieve that either through violence or through fairness.
In the context of the experimental bargaining game, fairness tended to help protect social status, according to Fehr and colleagues.
In the “ultimatum game,” as it was called, two players are presented with a sum of money, which they can keep if they can agree on how to split it. The catch is that just one player gets to propose—and only once—how it should be divided. The other player must accept or reject that offer. “Fair” offers, such as an even split, tend to be more readily accepted than “unfair” offers where the proposer tries to keep most of the money. Fehr and colleagues suggested that testosterone motivated players to propose “fairer” offers in order to avoid the social affront of rejection.
May 2, 2010
Poor, misunderstood testosterone
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