Testosterone.

[Bruce Al]

https://www.psypost.org/2018/06/testosterone-levels-determined-men-grow-according-new-research-51610

[Pseudonym]

Interesting! Although I'm not wildly surprised that people who grow up in richer environments have higher testosterone than the down-trodden poor.

 

I followed a link from your article to another one in a similar vein:

New study finds evidence that prestige increases testosterone levels in men

 

I find that one even more interesting, because it seems to support the theory that alpha males are wired to become even more dominant. Success breeds success (if success is a high testosterone level...)

 

Of course, as with all these studies, the devil is in the detail. I'd like to know more about how the study was conducted before attributing too much value to the findings.

[GyzzBrah]

18 hours ago, Pseudonym said:

Interesting! Although I'm not wildly surprised that people who grow up in richer environments have higher testosterone than the down-trodden poor.

 

I followed a link from your article to another one in a similar vein:

New study finds evidence that prestige increases testosterone levels in men

 

I find that one even more interesting, because it seems to support the theory that alpha males are wired to become even more dominant. Success breeds success (if success is a high testosterone level...)

 

Of course, as with all these studies, the devil is in the detail. I'd like to know more about how the study was conducted before attributing too much value to the findings.

 

Evolutionary psychology can be a bit misleading or overambitious when it comes to drawing implications from the data, but the research methods are generally sound (or they would not be published). So while the data may be legit, the conclusions drawn are often speculative and should be taken with a grain of salt.

 

Look up what Dr Jordan Peterson has to say about social hierarchy and the lobster brain, and how seretonin levels of the lobster increase / decrease based on their fighting success. If a lobster wins a fight they get a boost in seretonin and become stronger and more aggressive, if they loose their seretonin will decrease and they become weaker till they die. That's not at all how our brains work so he has gotten criticism for making that implication, but it's quite interesting and similar to what you posted.

 

 

[Kalidane]

Yes yes but we aren't lobsters and animal model trials cannot be translated to human outcomes.

 

And yes, bad science gets published daily.  Deeply flawed methodologies or outright abuse of statistics are both very common.  Why do you think many findings can never be reproduced brah?

[Pseudonym]

And in other testosterone-related research news...

 

Scientist-marketing team proves testosterone link with status products

A team of French marketing academics and neuroscientists has found that male sex hormone testosterone increases men’s preference for status goods – compared to goods of similar perceived quality but seen as lower in status.

 

Quote

To gain more insights on the role of testosterone on social rank and status associated behaviour, a study was conducted involving 243 men of similar age and socio-economic background. Randomly, half of them received a single dose of testosterone that mimicked a testosterone spike that could occur in an everyday situation causing an increased testosterone level; the other half received a placebo treatment. All subjects then participated in two tasks.

 

In the first one, they were asked to choose between pairs of brands. The pairs were composed of brands that were all pretested to have polarised social rank associations but did not differ in perceived quality. That is, one brand was seen to lift its owner much higher in the social hierarchy (eg, Calvin Klein) than the other (Levi’s).

 

For each pair, participants were asked: which brand do you prefer and to what extent? on 10-point scale anchored with each brand. The findings reveal that men who received the testosterone doses showed a higher preference for the status (positional) goods associated with higher social rank (such as a luxury brand). This suggests a causal link between testosterone and rank-related consumer preferences.