Help or punishment: acute stress moderates basal testosterone's association with prosocial behavior

Abstract

The gonadal hormone testosterone is well-recognized to facilitate various behaviors for obtaining social status. A good reputation (i.e. competitive, generous, and trustworthy) is of crucial importance for acquiring high social status. It is unclear which type of reputation is preferred by individuals under the influence of testosterone. Given that the recent dual-hormone hypothesis emphasizes the modulating effect of stress (cortisol) on the influence of testosterone, it would be intriguing to test the role of stress-induced cortisol in testosterone-related reputation seeking. To test this hypothesis, we induced acute stress in 93 participants with cold pressor test (CPT) paradigm (vs. control condition), and then they were instructed to play a third-party intervention game, in which they made decisions as an uninvolved, outside the third party to punish a violator, help a victim, or do nothing. Salivary samples were obtained to assess participants’ testosterone and cortisol levels. We split the testosterone concentration by median to low endogenous testosterone (LT) and high endogenous testosterone (HT). We found that HT individuals’ prosocial preferences did not affect by acute stress. They were more likely to choose punishment than helping under both stress and control conditions. In contrast, individuals with low testosterone were more inclined to help than punish under control conditions. Interestingly, acute stress brought behavior patterns of LT individuals closer to those of HT individuals, that is, they reduced their helping behavior and increased the intensity of punishments. In this preliminary study on the preference inducement of testosterone for different types of prosocial behaviors, we discuss the physiological mechanism of the relationship between testosterone and reputation and the implications of these results for the dual-hormone hypothesis.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Low testosterone (LT) individuals were more inclined to help than punish.

• High testosterone (HT) individuals were more inclined to punish than help.

• The HT individuals' preferences for prosocial types were not affected by acute stress.

• Acute stress brought the behavior patterns of LT individuals closer to those of HT individuals.

Keywords:

• Acute stress
• testosterone
• dual-hormone
• prosocial
• third-party intervention

Author contributions

Huagen Wang: conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, data curation, and writing original draft preparation. Zhen Zhen: preparation. Ruida Zhu: methodology. Bohai Yu: methodology. Shaozheng Qin: supervision and funding acquisition. Chao Liu: supervision, funding acquisition, and project administration.

Disclosure statement

No competing financial interests between the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31871094 and 32130045), the Major Project of National Social Science Foundation (19ZDA363), the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission (Z151100003915122), and the International Postdoctoral Exchange Fellowship Program (No. 2020002).