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Social status & testosterone

28 gwern 20 October 2011 02:05PM

We’ve discussed signaling and status endlessly on LW; I think this is right up our vein: a 2011 review of research on the connections between famous male hormone testosterone and various forms of social interaction and especially social status, Eisenegger et al’s “The role of testosterone in social interaction”. (I grabbed this PDF in the short time Elsevier left full-text available, but only now, with some modafinil-powered spare time, have gotten around to excerpting it for you guys.)

1 Abstract

Although animal researchers established the role of testosterone as a ‘social hormone’ decades ago, the investigation of its causal influence on human social behaviors has only recently begun. Here, we review and discuss recent studies showing the causal effects of testosterone on social interactions in animals and humans, and outline the basic neurobiological mechanisms that might underlie these effects. Based on these recent findings, we argue that the role of testosterone in human social behavior might be best understood in terms of the search for, and maintenance of, social status.

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