Stress pulls us apart: Anxiety leads to differences in competitive confidence under stress

Abstract

Social competition is a fundamental mechanism of evolution and plays a central role in structuring individual interactions and communities. Little is known about the factors that affect individuals' competitive success, particularly in humans. Key factors might include stress, a major evolutionary pressure that can affect the establishment of social hierarchies in animals, and individuals' trait anxiety, which largely determines susceptibility to stress and constitutes an important determinant of differences in competitive outcomes. Using an economic-choice experiment to assess competitive self-confidence in 229 human subjects we found that, whereas competitive self-confidence is unaffected by an individual's anxiety level in control conditions, exposure to the Trier social stress test for groups drives the behavior of individuals apart: low-anxiety individuals become overconfident, and high-anxiety individuals become underconfident. Cortisol responses to stress were found to relate to self-confidence, with the direction of the effects depending on trait anxiety. Our findings identify stress as a major regulator of individuals' competitiveness, affecting self-confidence in opposite directions in high and low anxious individuals. Therefore, our findings imply that stress may provide a new channel for generating social and economic inequality and, thus, not only be a consequence, but also a cause of inequality through its impact on competitive self-confidence and decision making in financially-relevant situations.

Enhanced Risk Aversion, But Not Loss Aversion, in Unmedicated Pathological Anxiety

“…Future work on treatment-seeking anxious patients may thus be useful to address possible differences. Finally, recent literature suggests that stress is an important modulator of decision making under risk (53, 54, 55, 56, 57), and may also interact with anxiety (58, 59). While we did not manipulate stress here, it would be interesting for future studies to investigate whether the effect of stress induction on risk aversion differ between pathologically anxious individuals and healthy control subjects.…”

An energetic view of stress: Focus on mitochondria

“…Further insights for a key role of mitochondrial function in specific brain regions in influencing complex social behaviors have been provided by a series of studies in rats relating anxiety with diminished social competitiveness (Hollis et al, 2015; van der Kooij et al, 2017), a phenomenon that has also been highlighted in humans (Goette et al, 2015). In rats, lower mitochondrial function in the nucleus accumbens was observed in high-anxious animals compared to their less anxious littermates, and was causally implicated in their low social competitiveness (Hollis et al, 2015).…”

Competitiveness and Stress

“…Goette et al. () find that cortisol response to social stress correlates with self‐confidence, and the effect depends on the level of trait anxiety. Coates and Herbert () demonstrate that cortisol levels of financial day traders increases with the variance of trading results and market volatility.…”