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Testosterone and
the Masters of the Universe

By Maryanne Garry, Ph.D. - The Psycho Professor
First published at www.johnberardi.com, Jul 4 2003.

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"Sherman resumed his walk toward First Avenue in a state of agitation. It was in the air! It was a wave! Everywhere! Inescapable! . . . Sex! . . . There for the taking! . . . It walked down the street, as bold as you please! …It was splashed all over the shops! If you were a young man and halfway alive, what chance did you have? …Who could remain monogamous with this, this, this tidal wave of concupiscence rolling across the world? Christ almighty! A Master of the Universe couldn't be a saint, after all . . . It was unavoidable."

Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities

Why is it that women are rarely seen picking fights at a bar, trying to bench press more than they can handle safely, or driving lost yet refusing to ask for directions? Most of the time, we are told, this kind of behavior occurs because men are really concerned about protecting their standing among other men. Moreover, men are lekkers. Leks are places (small universes) where male animals gather to show off, not only to other men, but primarily to women. You go to the lek to display your pretty peacock feathers so you can get lucky. In short, if you’re a man, you can’t afford to be weak, wimpy, or lost. When something threatens your standing—your place among the other peacocks—then you must act against it. Men, then, act to maintain their standing as Masters of the Universe.

If this idea is true, then men should also act against psychological threats to their status. But what about women? Women? Why, we women bench what we can handle, and always with crisp form; we leave the house with clear and complete directions for where we are going. We pull into the petrol station at the first sign that we are lost. What should women do in response to a psychological status threat?

Josephs et al. (2003) explain that although scientists have found high-T men are more likely to preserve and enhance their status compared to lower T men, most scientists have simply assumed that the same relationship would not hold among women—who, of course, are very low-T compared to most men. But, the authors argue, there is already research suggesting that status-maintaining behaviors (for example, not showing appeasement) occur more among high-T women than low-T women. Thus, despite what you might hear from women’s groups who call themselves “womyn’s groups” to separate themselves from the “men” in “women”, folk singer Holly Near’s idea that women are a “peaceful gentle people” is unsupported by the research. Clearly, some women would slap their sisters into next Tuesday before they’d hold hands and sing with them at a socialist rally.

The relationship between status and sex is what Josephs and his colleagues investigated in a set of experiments I'll describe below. The twist is that these researchers examined status and sex effects not on social behaviors, but on academic performance. They also speculated that the real relationships would not be between status and sex per se, but between status and testosterone. More specifically, if you expect to do well in something (to achieve high status), then if you’re a high-T person, you should perform more of the behaviors that make you do well. But if you expect not to do well (low status), then if you’re a high-T person, you’ll perform more of the behaviors that make you do badly. As the authors put it, testosterone is a behavioral amplifier.

Josephs and his colleagues found some men and women who said their math ability mattered to them and measured their T-levels before the study started. Then, they (secretly) put each sex into two groups, High and Low, based on a split around median (middle) T levels within each sex.

In their first experiment, there were two phases, [1] a manipulation phase in which some subjects were made anxious about their math ability, and [2] a math test.

In the first phase, half the subjects (Control subjects) responded to questions about their college experiences (whether they found it rewarding, or had an idea about their major, etc.). The other half (Primed subjects) responded to questions about their experiences with gender stereotypes and math performance (“I think that some people feel I have less math ability because of my gender”). These questions were designed to have no effect on either high-T or low-T men (because there is no stereotype that men are bad at math), to have some effect on low-T women, and to really wind up the high-T women. Because T is a behavioral amplifier, the nervousness women already tend to have about math performance should cause primed high-T women to have massive performance anxiety, which should in turn translate into poor math scores.

In the second phase, everybody tried to solve a bunch of math problems from the GRE. They also reported how nervous they were, because if the math questions worked the way they were supposed to, they should have no effect on men’s nervousness, prime low-T women’s nervousness somewhat, and prime high-T women’s nervousness the most.

What did the researchers find? First, the manipulation worked: the primed women were more nervous than primed men during the math test, and primed high-T women were more nervous than both control high-T women, and primed low-T women. But did this increased anxiety translate into poorer math performance? In a word, yes. The primed high-T women did worse on the math test than all the other women. On the whole men did better than women, and SAT scores and high school math background don’t account for the pattern of results.

In Experiment 2, the authors turned the stereotype threat on its head. Instead of targeting women’s stereotypes, they targeted men. Of course, men have a stereotype for math performance, in that they expect they will do well. Josephs et al. gave a math test to a group of men, but first told half of them that the test would identify the “weak ability” men, and told the other half that the test would identify the “exceptional ability” men. Now, because men tend to think that they are pretty good at math, they think the likelihood they might perform weakly on a math test is low. As a result, neither high-T nor low T-men should perceive a threat to their status. By contrast, when there is a chance to be identified as a Master of the Math Universe, high-T men want to be there. Thus, the authors. reasoned, high-T men in the “exceptional ability” (but not the “weak ability”) condition would work extra hard on the math test, and do better than everyone else. Put another way, their high-T would amplify their “working hard” behaviors more than their low-T counterparts.

That is indeed what they found. When they thought the math test provided them with a real challenge (the “exceptional ability” condition), high-T men picked up the gauntlet and outperformed the low-T men. They also skipped fewer questions than the low-T men, more evidence that they tried to rack up as many points as they could. But when they thought the test was probably a cakewalk (in the “weak ability” condition) high-T men didn’t do any better than the low-T men. In fact, there was a tendency for them to do worse, although they didn’t skip any more questions than the low-T men did.

There are a number of things you can you take away from this research, but there are two that might be particularly interesting to us JB.com people. First, these results might explain why, contrary to public opinion, there seems to be an overrepresentation of academic high achievers among weightlifters. Simply put, high T-people do everything in their power to excel and this translates to the gym and to the classroom.

In addition, because it’s likely that women who are new to weightlifting have some anxiety about being in the gym, if a high-T woman’s ability, relative to men, is threatened, her performance might suffer. For example, a pinhead personal trainer who tells a high-T woman that women should train differently from men because of some limitation that women have inherent to their gender, may actually cause her to underperform—or worse, stop training. After all, high T-women underperform when status is threatened.

(Editor’s note: Of course, feelings and inclinations are often uncontrollable but behavior is often a choice. While understanding how our physiology is linked to our behavior is intriguing, we’re not slaves to our physiology unless we choose to be).

References

Josephs, R.A., Newman, M. L, Brown, R. P., & Beer, J. M. (2003). Status, testosterone, and human intellectual performance: stereotype threat as status concern. Psychological Science, 14, 158-162.