Testosterone Administration Moderates Effect of Social Environment on Trust in Women Depending on Second-to-Fourth Digit Ratio.
Animal research has established that effects of hormones on social behaviour depend on characteristics of both individual and environment. Insight from research on humans into this interdependence is limited, though. Specifically, hardly any prior testosterone experiments in humans scrutinized the interdependency of testosterone with the social environment. Nonetheless, recent testosterone administration studies in humans repeatedly show that a proxy for individuals' prenatal testosterone-to-estradiol ratio, second-to-fourth digit-ratio (2D:4D ratio), influences effects of testosterone administration on human social behaviour. Here, we systematically vary the characteristics of the social environment and show that, depending on prenatal sex hormone priming, testosterone administration in women moderates the effect of the social environment on trust. We use the economic trust game and compare one-shot games modelling trust problems in relations between strangers with repeated games modelling trust problems in ongoing relations between partners. As expected, subjects are more trustful in repeated than in one-shot games. In subjects prenatally relatively highly primed by testosterone, however, this effect disappears after testosterone administration. We argue that impairments in cognitive empathy may reduce the repeated game effect on trust after testosterone administration in subjects with relatively high prenatal testosterone exposure and propose a neurobiological explanation for this effect.
Department of Sociology/ICS, Utrecht University, Padualaan 14, 3584 CH Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Vincent
V
Buskens
Department of Sociology/ICS, Utrecht University, Padualaan 14, 3584 CH Utrecht, The Netherlands.|Nuffield College, University of Oxford, New Road, Oxford OX1 1NF, United Kingdom.
Werner
W
Raub
Department of Sociology/ICS, Utrecht University, Padualaan 14, 3584 CH Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Nynke
N
van Miltenburg
Department of Experimental Psychology, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 1, 3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Estrella R
ER
Montoya
Department of Experimental Psychology, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 1, 3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands.|Department of Psychiatry and Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine (IDM), University of Cape Town, 7925 Cape Town, South Africa.
Jack
J
van Honk
D016022:Case-Control Studies; D004311:Double-Blind Method; D005260:Female; D005385:Fingers / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D005717:Games, Experimental; D006801:Humans; D012931:Social Environment; D013739:Testosterone / Q000494:pharmacology*; D035502:Trust; D055815:Young Adult
D013739:Testosterone