While status threat monitoring can be useful for maintaining one’s position, it can also heighten into a debilitating paranoia regarding one’s social networks and status attainment. Basically, men will try to assert dominance by meeting a signal of possible aggression with one of their own. As mentioned last time, researchers studying primate behavior have found that alpha chimps tend to be a little high-strung because they’re constantly on the lookout for would-be pretenders to their throne. Once both primates and people make it to the top of a social hierarchy the tendency is for them to try to stay on top and avoid low status for as long as possible. As we saw in our series about shyness, stress and anxiety before social interactions increases people’s self-consciousness, which in turn makes them fumble over words or clam up and consequently feel like a dope.
Everyone wants to keep the hits of T, dopamine, and serotonin coming, and avoid the misery that results when these feel-good, charged-up neurotransmitters and hormones plummet. And cortisol’s choke-inducing propensity doesn’t just happen in direct competitions. We’ll discuss why that is in a later article in this series about the evolution of status. What’s interesting is while the cortisol response to status defeat occurs in both men and women, it’s much stronger in men, particularly when the status is achievement related. Really becoming aloof to how she treats you might take some time and cognitive work, but eventually her behavior will fail to trigger a reaction in you. The fact that you only get a rise/drop in T in relation to status pursuits you care about also means that your higher thinking functions can exercise some control over this physiological/neurological response. Even achieving success in situations that we don’t think of as real contests can impact your T; slaying your friends with jokes or nailing a presentation will level up you testosterone, making you feel awesome and ready to take on the world.
High testosterone levels can also disrupt social bonds by enhancing individuals' sensitivity to perceived threats to their social status, leading to increased aggression and conflict. For mammals living in multimale groups, aggression is hypothesized to link male social status (i.e. dominance rank) and testosterone levels, given that high status predicts mating success and is acquired partly through aggressive intragroup competition. We assert that aggression rates are insufficient to explain links between dominance rank and testosterone levels in male chimpanzees and that other social variables (e.g. male–male relationship quality) may regulate testosterone's links to aggression. In the present study, we test both aggression levels and lean muscle mass, as measured by urinary creatinine, as links between dominance rank and testosterone levels in a large sample of wild male chimpanzees.
There was no straightforward winner-loser effect upon testosterone change, although there was evidence of moderation by outcome closeness and basal cortisol levels25. Despite these robust psychological effects of the competition outcome, our hypothesis that these changes were hormonally regulated was not supported. As each of these confidence intervals includes zero, we infer no support for a mediating role of mood change between the effect of competition outcome and the cognitive measures. Higher D scores reflect greater conspicuous consumption by showing facilitated responding when associating high-status products with pleasant words, and low-status products with unpleasant words. We used the difference score between WTP for higher-status vs. lower-status products as the dependent variable, with higher (more positive) values representinggreater explicit conspicuous consumption. We looked at the further influence of outcome closeness and basal cortisol levels on the dependent variables (i.e. WTP, IAT, and rejection rate in UG), and there were no significant main effects or interactive terms (see Supplementary Information). Following our tests of conspicuous consumption, participants played as responders in an ultimatum game (UG).
You might not think of it as a status competition, but when we make idle chit-chat with strangers, we’re signaling to others our status through things like how we look, our level of confidence, and our adroitness at conversation. In any interaction where status is on the line, elevated cortisol levels will get in the way of you doing your best. If an animal gets beaten in a status competition, it won’t do him any good to keep fighting over and over just to get squashed again and again. This one-two punch of decreasing testosterone and increasing cortisol blunts the status drive. Losers, on the other hand, whose T levels had dropped from the defeat, were more likely to opt-out of participating in another competition. Whenever we win (or perceive that others think highly of us), our body reinforces the drive for status by giving us another testosterone boost. Other studies have found surgeons will experience a 500% increase in their T right before demanding operations.
In some cases, testosterone therapy has been used to treat mood symptoms in men with low testosterone. Low self-esteem is linked to a variety of mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, and social withdrawal. Testosterone appears to modulate this system, increasing the emotional impact of social signals. More importantly, testosterone also made men more sensitive to the feedback itself. Men who received testosterone were more optimistic when anticipating approval from high-approval raters, but also more pessimistic with raters known to give negative feedback. Unbeknownst to the participants, the feedback they received was pre-programmed. During the task, participants predicted whether they would receive approval from each "rater" and then received feedback in the form of a thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or no response.
The relationship isn’t as simple as aggression always equaling higher testosterone. Early testosterone exposure predicts dominance in women as well as men re 2D/4D ratio In many primates, staring directly at another is an assertion of social dominance.
Similarly, in the initial target-category discrimination task (Block 2, 20 trials), participants discriminated between higher-status products (responding by pressing left key) and lower-status products (responding by pressing right key). However, a pertinent confound with this manipulation is that the higher-status cars are objectively more expensive than the lower-status cars, and thus socioeconomic variables (e.g. salary) will further influence consumption decisions. To intensify the competition, the participants were told immediately before the contest that the Tetris winner would receive an engraved trophy with the text "Tetris winner" and a chocolate bar.

Gender: Female

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