Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (18 page)

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Authors: James McBride Dabbs,Mary Godwin Dabbs

Tags: #test

BOOK: Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior
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I am!" The boys' words are about as rational as the heated exchanges between Judge Clarence Thomas and members of the Senate judiciary committee during Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Boys argue from the principle of sufficient obstinacy, which fills their little heads.
Aggressive behavior is evident in little boys and persists into adulthood, but it is nevertheless subject to cultural influence. In a cross-cultural study of preference for violent versus nonviolent ways of resolving conflicts, Dane Archer and Patricia McDaniel discovered the sex difference in violence to be relative rather than absolute. They found that within each society, young men were more inclined toward violence than young women, but young women in some societies were more violent than young men in others.
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Cross-cultural studies and observations of everyday life make it clear that violence is not the invariable outcome of high testosterone levels. More typically, testosterone makes people want to be in charge: drive the car, pick the topic, run the war. Men compete in work and play, using recreational activities to establish dominance. A study offour couples sailing the north coast of Scotland showed high testosterone among men jockeying for dominance. The men were physicians on vacation, and every day they collected blood samples from themselves for later testosterone assay. Unknown to them, the women on the boat were rating them on dominance, on whether they were assertive, aggressive, bossy, and insisted on doing "important" things, like holding the wheel and steering the boat. The results showed more signs of dominance in the high-testosterone men.
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Like the doctors on vacation, one of my former student assistants, who is high in testosterone, takes time off from work but not from competition. On weekends, he and his friends travel for miles to find windy hillsides where they can compete with stunt kites. The kites are so big it takes two hands to hold one, and it can drag its owner along with his heels dug into the ground. The men have turned a child's game into a macho sport.
Another macho sport is hunting. While some men still hunt for the same reasons our ancestors didto provide food for their familiesmany modern hunters hunt just for sport, a tribute to the legacy of the hunters in their evolutionary family tree. Hunting is consistent with a
 
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predatory frame of mind, which includes the will to dominate, single-mindedness, and an ability to disregard discomfort; the spatial skills needed to stalk, chase, kill, and find the way home are its ancient components. As hunters became more civilized, hunting often took on a social patina, with special clothing, fancy equipment, and various rituals with connotations of social status and character, as well as dominance. In England upper-class men and women engage in foxhunting, a sport with an aristocratic lineage, a strict dress code, and lots of protocol.
There are fewer wild animals to hunt today and fewer hunters, but the genes men inherited from their hunter ancestors still affect the way they think. Modern men, even many who never hunt, watch television shows about wild animals. The National Geographic Society has found that its nature films are most popular among young men, and the shows young men like most are those in which a predator chases, catches, and kills its prey. Some men, and now some women, approach business, politics, and sports much as they approach hunting or war. People with predatory instincts compete for glory in these quasi-civilized activities, playing games that produce winners and losers.
This idea that men are predators is a metaphor, but it may help us understand evolutionary pressures that produced one very odd difference between men and women. That difference is a larger brain size in men than in women. Testosterone appears to have given men big heads, literally and figuratively. Men have larger brains in part because they have larger bodies, but even after adjusting for body size, men have larger brains than one would expect.
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The difference is not great; it amounts to about a hundred grams, or three teaspoons full. Scientists don't know what, if any, difference in intellectual functioning is associated with the difference in brain size.
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Researchers who studied Einstein's brain reported, "Einstein's brain weight was not different from that of controls, clearly indicating that a large (heavy) brain is not a necessary condition for exceptional intellect."
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Maybe the geographic and mechanical abilities needed for tracking victims and predicting their movement take up a lot of space.
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Maybe outwitting a victim takes more brainpower.
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Scientists are not even sure that men's larger brains contain more brain cells than women's. Research indicates that cells are more densely packed in women's brains, especially in areas responsible for under-
 
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standing language.
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Einstein's brain seems to indicate that being smart might be a matter of the number of cells and not one of total brain size. His brain was of average weight, but had wider parietal lobes, reduced or missing fissures, and an underdeveloped operculum. It contained more glial cells, which stimulate neurons, and more neurons in the cortex.
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As yet, there have been no studies showing whether or not there is a difference in brain size between high- and low-testosterone men.
Fighting is at the competitive core of dominance, and other features surround this core. Beyond simple thoughts and action, geographic and mechanical skills, and willingness to fight, one thing more is needed. Dominant people need to look and sound dominant. They need panache.
Panache:
Looking the Part
"Panache" is a word that summarizes qualities of appearance and manner that contribute to getting the attention and respect of others. A person with panache scores points by looking dominant. Bluffing often works just as well as fighting when it comes to getting attention and respect. Male animals bristle, puff, strut, preen, spread their tail feathers, control space, intimidate their opponents, and show off to get their way and impress the opposite sex. Male orangutans use their jaws to threaten more than to bite,
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and large deer use their antlers to intimidate small deer. In 1576, Turbervile wrote in a hunting book that stags who encounter receptive females
 . . . will rayse their nose up into the ayre, and looke aloft, as though they gave thankes to nature which gave them so great delight. And if it be a great Hart, he will turne his heade, and will looke if there be none other neare to anoy or interrupt him. Then the young deare being not able to abyde them, and seing them make such countenances, will withdraw them selves from them and runne away.
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Threat, bluff, and flamboyance are far less costly than fighting. Acting powerful is an easy route to success for people as well as animals. People in primitive societies use body paint, tattoos, scars, headdresses, and ritual postures and dances to signal their importance. Political leaders
 
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use oratory and charisma to rally their followers. Testosterone seems to be positively related to putting on a good show. Actors, along with football players, have higher testosterone levels than the other professional groups we have studied so far, as will be described in more detail in Chapter 6.
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Sometimes male bluster is hardwired into the brain by early testosterone. Once the pattern is set, it may even survive castration. An acquaintance who raises horses told me about a gelding named Buffet, who was neutered late in life, after testosterone had determined his development. He cannot mate, but he raises his tail, tosses his head, snorts, and paws the ground. He acts so much like the horse in charge that the young colts run away and the mares present themselves to him for mating.
Like Buffet, Cyrano de Bergerac presented an image that is manly and, following Hemingway's definition of courage as "grace under pressure," courageous. Cyrano dueled with panache, with verve and a saber and feathers in his hat, reciting poetry. Men want to look the part, and sometimes their last thoughts on earth are about their appearance. Sekou Sundiata, an African-American poet, tells about his great-great-grandfather Papa John, who was a slave in South Carolina. Papa John had lived on many different plantations because he was so unmanageable that no one wanted to keep him. He was finally lynched, and when asked for any last words he said, "Hand me my mirror, so I can see my hair."
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Vanity goes along with high levels of testosterone. I thought of Papa John on a pleasant fall afternoon recently. I was out driving, and I had stopped at a red light behind a couple in a shiny red convertible. The driver, a balding man on the young side of middle age, was lean, muscular, and physically fit. He looked at himself in his rearview mirror and ran his hand back through his thinning hair. When he was satisfied with the way it looked, he turned to the attractive woman beside him and started talking. He had expansive gestures, moving his arms and pointing at things as he talked. When we got to the next stoplight, once again he leaned over to check his hair in the mirror. Showing off is a part of everyday life that I have noticed more and more since I have been studying testosterone.
Men do not have fancy tail feathers, but they are peacocks just the same. My overall impression from the research we have done is that men
 
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who are high in testosterone think well of themselves. They see themselves as people of consequence. They don't make little jokes about themselves or put themselves down. They know that being dominant includes thinking, looking, and acting dominant, and their manner displays a sense of confidence, power, and superiority. Tattoos, gold chains, and convertibles are among the accoutrements of looking dominant.
Audie Murphy understood the psychology of dominance. He was the most decorated American soldier in World War II. He later became a professional actor, but he had always been a man with a keen appreciation of the importance of style. He believed in the shock value of behavior. He said,
If I discovered one valuable thing during my early combat days, it was audacity, which is often mistaken for courage or foolishness. It is neither. Audacity is a tactical weapon. Nine times out of ten it will throw the enemy off-balance and confuse him.
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Audie Murphy used audacious physical threats, but audacity can work in the absence of threat. Sometimes unexpected one-upmanship is audacious enough. A friend who once worked for Greenpeace was involved in the 1995 protest over French nuclear testing. He delighted his mother with a story about a female volunteer who bested the French authorities with a grand gesture. They boarded a Greenpeace ship and demanded the keys. She showed the men the keys and then, right under their noses, pitched the keys overboard. All flamboyant behavior carries a kind of audacity. Women can be as flamboyant as men in dress, hairstyle, personal manner, even body art and tattoos. In a high-testosterone delinquent group we studied in Atlanta, both men and women had tattoos, dramatic dress, and a lifestyle that included car wrecks, fights, and trouble with the police.
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Panache can be audacious and flamboyant, or it can be more subtle. People can stand out because they have "presence," a quality that suggests physical, moral, or intellectual power. People who have presence convey the force of their personalities immediately and effectively. John Wayne epitomized presence. Cultural critic Garry Wills said, "His body spoke a highly specific language of 'manliness,' of self-reliant authority . . . It was a body impervious to outside force, expressing a mind narrow

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