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Emile comments on Social status & testosterone - Less Wrong Discussion

28 Post author: gwern 20 October 2011 02:05PM

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Comment author: Craig_Heldreth 20 October 2011 04:57:02PM *  7 points [-]

The most interesting info on this topic I have seen is a trans guy's biography:

Becoming a Visible Man.

They interviewed the author on NPR and it was compelling audio (could not find it with a basic search). The thing which stuck out was his report that after he started taking the testosterone his personality and behavior and world view all changed very radically. He would be walking down crowded city sidewalks and intentionally bump into guys and behave in other defiant and challenging manners which were unimaginable to him before he started the therapy when still a bio woman.

Comment author: Emile 20 October 2011 08:20:24PM 11 points [-]

I heard that FtM transsexuals tend to be much more aggressive than ("normal") males, because unlike men they aren't used to living with those hormones since they were kids.

Comment author: MikeSamsa 21 October 2011 06:13:04AM 7 points [-]

Part of the problem here is that even if testosterone had absolutely no effect on aggression at all, we would still see people taking testosterone injections acting more aggressive. Why? Because the common belief is that testosterone will make you more aggressive. Give them saline and tell them it's testosterone and they'll start bumping people in the street as well.

To test whether there is an actual effect going on here, they'd need to look at what how two different groups of FtM transsexuals respond when one is placed on a placebo, and one given testosterone. The article linked to by Gwern discusses this effect of perception on behavior:

Folk wisdom holds that testosterone causes antisocial, egoistic, or even aggressive behaviors in humans. However, the correlational studies discussed above already suggest that this simple folk view probably requires revision [34,56]. A recent placebo-controlled testosterone administration study found support for the idea that the testosterone–aggression link might be based upon ‘folk’ views: individuals given placebo who believed they had been given testosterone showed less fair bargaining offers compared with those who believed that they had received placebo, thus confirming people’s stereotypes about the behavioral effects of testosterone. More importantly, however, when statistically controlling for this belief of treatment assignment, one acute dose of testosterone in women increased the fairness of proposers’ bargaining offers in an ultimatum game [13] (Figure 3).