Does testosterone make people have more masculine economic preferences? Does it make people act more like Republicans? We now have a large, pre-registered double-blind randomized controlled study that provides an answer🧵
To test whether testosterone masculinized economic preferences, the first thing to do was modify testosterone levels. This was done with an intranasal administration that boosted female levels by about 82%, and male levels by a bit over 100 ng/dl. Not huge, but sizable enough.
The next thing to do was test! This was done three times over in games that assess economic preferences. The first of these was the ultimatum game, within which, men tend to be more aggressive in their offers.
The second game was the trust game. In this game, the trustor sends money to the trustee, it gets multiplied, and the trustee then sends an amount back. The more trust, the higher the potential for gain.
The third game was the dictator game. In this game, a dictator player chooses how much money to send to another player. This assesses how people balance fairness and self-interest.
The effect of testosterone on proposals made in the ultimatum game? Nothing. The effect on investment in the trust game? Nothing. The effect on amounts sent in the dictator game? Nothing.
But what about on the other end? Perhaps the masculine way to play is to be more aggressive in saying "no" to bad offers, or to send back less money. No. Nothing was affected.
The effect of testosterone isn't even seen on measured risk averseness or aversion towards losses.
In effect, what we see is that acute testosterone administration effects are basically nothing on economic preferences. Plenty of papers have claimed there is something, but they come from smaller studies without pre-registration, and they're often pretty hacky.
But here we see nothing. If testosterone masculinizes economic preferences, it does not do so acutely, it does so over time, or it requires going far higher in dosages. But if that latter possibility were the case, there wouldn't be big sex differences in economic preferences.
Hopefully in the future, people will start citing this large, preregistered double-blind experiment instead of nonsense like this: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/...
*big sex differences due to androgen levels. Also, for the people misreading this, see: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/...