Prejudice and truth about the effect of testosterone on human bargaining behaviour

Abstract

Both biosociological and psychological models, as well as animal research, suggest that testosterone has a key role in social interactions. Evidence from animal studies in rodents shows that testosterone causes aggressive behaviour towards conspecifics. Folk wisdom generalizes and adapts these findings to humans, suggesting that testosterone induces antisocial, egoistic, or even aggressive human behaviours. However, many researchers have questioned this folk hypothesis, arguing that testosterone is primarily involved in status-related behaviours in challenging social interactions, but causal evidence that discriminates between these views is sparse. Here we show that the sublingual administration of a single dose of testosterone in women causes a substantial increase in fair bargaining behaviour, thereby reducing bargaining conflicts and increasing the efficiency of social interactions. However, subjects who believed that they received testosterone-regardless of whether they actually received it or not-behaved much more unfairly than those who believed that they were treated with placebo. Thus, the folk hypothesis seems to generate a strong negative association between subjects' beliefs and the fairness of their offers, even though testosterone administration actually causes a substantial increase in the frequency of fair bargaining offers in our experiment.

Testosterone administration does not affect men's rejections of low ultimatum game offers or aggressive mood

“…A previous administration study reported that beliefs about having received T or placebo were significantly correlated with proposer offers in the ultimatum game (Eisenegger et al, 2010). In our data, beliefs had no significant effect on rejection rates Evidence of a positive correlation between baseline T levels and low offer rejections was found in two previous studies (Burnham, 2007;Mehta and Beer, 2010).…”

“…Secondly, subjects were aware of the fact that other participants were making offers after receiving T. Players' intentions and their degree of control over their actions are known to have important effects on fairness considerations and on subjects' responses to these actions (Falk et al, 2008). For this reason, folk wisdom about the effects of T on antisocial behavior (Eisenegger et al, 2010) may have easily affected responders' attitudes towards low ultimatum offers.…”

“…The second study administering T to subjects in an ultimatum game was a betweensubjects experiment conducted with women which found that T increased proposer offers (Eisenegger et al, 2010). In this case, their results were only significant after controlling for beliefs about being in the placebo or T condition.…”

“…There are very few studies investigating the effects of exogenous manipulations of T on economic behavior, and most have focused on female, rather than male behavior M A N U S C R I P T ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT 4 (Zethraeus et al, 2009;Bos et al, 2010;Eisenegger et al, 2010;van Honk et al, 2012;Boksem et al, 2013). Some exceptions of recent work involving T administration in healthy men include Zak et al (2009), who report suggestive evidence that it decreased generosity, 1 Wibral et al (2012) who found that it reduced lying, Carré et al (2015) who showed that it impaired socio-cognitive ability only in subjects with low 2D4D or low psychopathic traits, Cueva et al (2015) who found that it increased risk-taking in an investment task, and Carré et al (2016) who found that it led to greater aggression only in subjects scoring high in trait dominance or low in trait self-control.…”

Effects of exogenous testosterone and mating context on men's preferences for female facial femininity

“…For example, a recent review by Bos et al (2013) showed that with the exception of one study with a relatively large sample size (Eisenegger et al, 2010; N = 121), previous T-administration studies have had an average of 18 participants, with a modal sample size of 16. Thus, the sample size and within-subject design in Experiment 1 made it a relatively powerful test of intra-individual variation in facial preferences.…”