Slanted Science

It is a widely-held belief that testosterone turns men into wild, aggressive beasts. But a research paper just published shows that the ‘male hormone’ does no such thing. In fact, scientists show, a quick dose of testosterone actually makes women behave more fairly in a laboratory-controlled game.

We foresee some heated discussions tonight at dinner tables everywhere.

Ladies: blame Ernst Fehr, a professor of neuroeconomics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. He’s the scientist who led this research, which we can in no way condone, and in fact find rather distasteful. Ahem.

His team took 121 female volunteers, and asked them to participate in a game scientifically designed to test people’s fairness. The research is published in Nature and here’s how the game works:

The women were paired. Person A was then given 10 units of the local currency (Swiss Francs, in this case) and they decided how the money would be split (‘I’ll take 7, you have 3‘, for example). Person B then decides whether to accept or decline the split. However, if they decline, then neither person gets any of the cash. The drive, then, is for Person A to come up with a split which is appealing to both parties, and the fairest way to do this is 50-50. By the way, all dealings were done via computer, meaning that the ladies didn’t base their judgments on parameters such as “Oh my God, she looked like a total skank, so I only offered her 2 Francs.”

Prior to playing the game, each of the women was given either a dose of testosterone or a placebo. The popular thinking about testosterone’s effects would lead to the conclusion that those who received the hormone would play more aggressively, and try to claim more than their share of the cash.

Wrong. What actually happened was that players who had been given testosterone gave significantly fairer deals than those with the placebo. But there’s more.

The boffins lied to some of the women, telling them they had taken testosterone, when in fact they’d had the placebo. And these women played up to the stereotype, displaying super-aggressive behavior. Fehr, quoted in the journal Science, says that the results indicate…

…that the subjects’ negative assumptions about testosterone–not the hormone itself–led to antisocial behavior.

Don’t Hold Your Breath, But This May Lead To: an understanding that men are naturally fair creatures, and that their spouses should realize that when a man allows her to wash the dishes every night, it is actually a display of magnanimity that she just can’t understand.