Men in committed, romantic relationships (whether married or just with boyfriends/girlfriends) had 21% less testosterone than those not in them: http://bec.ucla.edu/papers/Gray_10-20-03.pdf
Increased testosterone after a loss increases likelihood of persevering and competing again: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...18506X06001887
Men with increased testosterone "were 27% less generous towards strangers with money they controlled." http://journals.plos.org/plosone/art...l.pone.0008330
From "The Sexual Paradox:
This article analyzes the effects of testosterone on video games and mentions the "willingness to persevere after loss" effect but applied to video games.
Also, Adult women who were exposed to unusually high levels of androgens in the womb due to congenital adrenal hyperplasia score significantly higher on tests of spatial ability. And testosterone declines by roughly 1% per year starting at age 30 -- so by age 65, it will have declined by 35% or more. Why does this matter? Because a group of 56 healthy older men (aged 60–75 yrs) were supplemented for 3 mo with testosterone to 150% of baseline, which resulted in significant enhancement of spatial cognition and no change in any other cognitive domain.
These things matter, because they hold strong implications for success in sports, esports, and risky/adversarial careers like trial law and investment banking; if gender discrimination is cited as a major reason for why, say, 13 percent of women make up the Association of Trial Lawyers of America membership when hormonal explanations are sufficient to explain causality, or if tendency to persevere after loss / predicted spatial ability / tendency to be adversarial are predicted with higher testosterone (or at least higher testosterone relative to women), then this would explain a huge portion of the sex disparity in both esports and abstract board game sports like chess. Note that even if this were true, some women would still reach the top, since women with very high testosterone exist -- they just wouldn't be as common, and since the benefit of high testosterone is most strongly felt in sports involving strength/power, those women can get more return for their hobby-time by going into traditional sports, such as a scholarship or even professional career, when they would barely get anything in return from spending all their time playing league of legends or starcraft.
Another unintended consequence of the perseverance result: it may have an effect on how many people participate in skeptic/rationalist practices like belief-updating.
What would perseverance have to do with skepticism? Well, it involves belief-updating after you've found a previous belief of yours untenable. Now, finding out that you can no longer justify a belief is not a competitive loss, but for lots of people, being wrong might FEEL like a loss, even if it's not actually a loss of anything. Laypeople associate arguments with winning, for example, even though that is an incorrect model of what argumentation actually is. Now, I doubt men in rationalist/skeptic communities have very high testosterone because of the result earlier about how managers have significantly higher testosterone than programmers, and programmers make up a huge chunk of rationalists. But very high testosterone is not necessary to induce a perseverance effect -- they just need to have *enough*. Even a man with lower-than-average testosterone still has significantly more testosterone than the average woman, which could be enough to create a disparity in who is willing to belief-update. If this is the case, then belief-updating (and the whole process around this) might be correlated with testosterone levels to a degree, even if it's not necessarily increased at very high levels of testosterone.
Either way, some of these results are fascinating, and carry implications beyond their superficial result.
Increased testosterone after a loss increases likelihood of persevering and competing again: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...18506X06001887
Men with increased testosterone "were 27% less generous towards strangers with money they controlled." http://journals.plos.org/plosone/art...l.pone.0008330
From "The Sexual Paradox:
This article analyzes the effects of testosterone on video games and mentions the "willingness to persevere after loss" effect but applied to video games.
Also, Adult women who were exposed to unusually high levels of androgens in the womb due to congenital adrenal hyperplasia score significantly higher on tests of spatial ability. And testosterone declines by roughly 1% per year starting at age 30 -- so by age 65, it will have declined by 35% or more. Why does this matter? Because a group of 56 healthy older men (aged 60–75 yrs) were supplemented for 3 mo with testosterone to 150% of baseline, which resulted in significant enhancement of spatial cognition and no change in any other cognitive domain.
These things matter, because they hold strong implications for success in sports, esports, and risky/adversarial careers like trial law and investment banking; if gender discrimination is cited as a major reason for why, say, 13 percent of women make up the Association of Trial Lawyers of America membership when hormonal explanations are sufficient to explain causality, or if tendency to persevere after loss / predicted spatial ability / tendency to be adversarial are predicted with higher testosterone (or at least higher testosterone relative to women), then this would explain a huge portion of the sex disparity in both esports and abstract board game sports like chess. Note that even if this were true, some women would still reach the top, since women with very high testosterone exist -- they just wouldn't be as common, and since the benefit of high testosterone is most strongly felt in sports involving strength/power, those women can get more return for their hobby-time by going into traditional sports, such as a scholarship or even professional career, when they would barely get anything in return from spending all their time playing league of legends or starcraft.
Another unintended consequence of the perseverance result: it may have an effect on how many people participate in skeptic/rationalist practices like belief-updating.
What would perseverance have to do with skepticism? Well, it involves belief-updating after you've found a previous belief of yours untenable. Now, finding out that you can no longer justify a belief is not a competitive loss, but for lots of people, being wrong might FEEL like a loss, even if it's not actually a loss of anything. Laypeople associate arguments with winning, for example, even though that is an incorrect model of what argumentation actually is. Now, I doubt men in rationalist/skeptic communities have very high testosterone because of the result earlier about how managers have significantly higher testosterone than programmers, and programmers make up a huge chunk of rationalists. But very high testosterone is not necessary to induce a perseverance effect -- they just need to have *enough*. Even a man with lower-than-average testosterone still has significantly more testosterone than the average woman, which could be enough to create a disparity in who is willing to belief-update. If this is the case, then belief-updating (and the whole process around this) might be correlated with testosterone levels to a degree, even if it's not necessarily increased at very high levels of testosterone.
Either way, some of these results are fascinating, and carry implications beyond their superficial result.
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