Testosterone disrupts human collaboration by increasing egocentric choices

Abstract

Collaboration can provide benefits to the individual and the group across a variety of contexts. Even in simple perceptual tasks, the aggregation of individuals' personal information can enable enhanced group decision-making. However, in certain circumstances such collaboration can worsen performance, or even expose an individual to exploitation in economic tasks, and therefore a balance needs to be struck between a collaborative and a more egocentric disposition. Neurohumoral agents such as oxytocin are known to promote collaborative behaviours in economic tasks, but whether there are opponent agents, and whether these might even affect information aggregation without an economic component, is unknown. Here, we show that an androgen hormone, testosterone, acts as such an agent. Testosterone causally disrupted collaborative decision-making in a perceptual decision task, markedly reducing performance benefit individuals accrued from collaboration while leaving individual decision-making ability unaffected. This effect emerged because testosterone engendered more egocentric choices, manifest in an overweighting of one's own relative to others' judgements during joint decision-making. Our findings show that the biological control of social behaviour is dynamically regulated not only by modulators promoting, but also by those diminishing a propensity to collaborate.

Hormonal underpinnings of status conflict: Testosterone and cortisol are related to decisions and satisfaction in the hawk-dove game

“…Research in humans also demonstrates connections between testosterone and status-seeking behavior (for reviews, see Mazur and Booth, 1998;Archer, 2006;Eisenegger et al, 2011;Hamilton et al, 2015). Both endogenous testosterone and exogenously elevated testosterone are positively related to markers of dominance motivation (van Honk et al, 2001;Schultheiss et al, 2005;Josephs et al, 2006;Hermans et al, 2008;Bos et al, 2012;Terburg et al, 2012;Terburg and van Honk, 2013;Goetz et al, 2014;Enter et al, 2014;Radke et al, 2015;Mehta et al, 2008;Zilioli and Watson, 2013;van der Meij et al, 2016), aggressive behavior (Carré et al, 2009;Carré and Olmstead, 2015), competitive behavior Carré and McCormick, 2008;Mehta et al, 2008Mehta et al, , 2009Slatcher et al, 2011;Mehta et al, 2015bMehta et al, , 2015cReimers and Diekhof, 2015;Hahn et al, 2016;Eisenegger et al, 2016), and reduced prosocial behaviors including trust, perspective-taking, cooperation, and empathy (Hermans et al, 2006;Mehta et al, 2009;Bos et al, 2010;van Honk et al, 2011;Boksem et al, 2013;Wright et al, 2012;Ronay and Carney, 2013;Edelstein et al, 2014).…”

Salivary testosterone and cortisol are jointly related to pro-environmental behavior in men

“…Moreover, testosterone administration has been shown to reduce empathy (Hermans, Putman, & van Honk, 2006), collaborative decision-making (Wright et al, 2012), and generosity towards strangers (Zak et al, 2009). Notably, however, exogenous testosterone has also been reported to promote generosity (Eisenegger, Naef, Snozzi, Heinrichs, & Fehr, 2010) and reciprocity (Boksem et al, 2013) and to reduce lying (Wibral, Dohmen, Klingmüller, Weber, & Falk, 2012) in situations where the display of prosocial behavior is instrumental in gaining social status.…”

Testosterone and Reconciliation Among Women: After-Competition Testosterone Predicts Prosocial Attitudes Towards Opponents

“…For example, basal T appears inversely related to the ability to accurately infer the thoughts and feelings of others (Ronay and Carney 2013), colleagues' ratings of one's leadership abilities (Ronay and Carney 2013), and performance in cooperative competition (Mehta et al 2009). In women, administration of T appears to reduce behaviors thought to reflect empathy (Hermans et al 2006;van Honk and Schutter 2007;van Honk et al 2011) and, in one study, increased egocentric decision-making (Wright et al 2012). However, the desire to reconcile with an opponent and attempts to do so are probably not motivated by inherently altruistic motives (Eisenegger et al 2010) or necessarily benefitted by the ability to infer minute emotional dispositions.…”