Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (46 page)

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Authors: James McBride Dabbs,Mary Godwin Dabbs

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BOOK: Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior
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Power and Legend
Leaders often go a step beyond initiation into manhood or womanhood. The extra step, which usually involves overcoming extreme difficulties, transforms manhood or womanhood into something more. Transforming experiences are reflected in personal histories about the creation of new and stronger identities, and the backgrounds of many leaders contain stories that take on the character of legends, describing struggles and successes that mark transitions to greatness. A leader may have been a warrior, battled cancer, overcome poverty, or marched for civil rights in Alabama. Often leaders have humble beginnings but have been transformed and risen above those origins.
12
They are both "of the people and beyond the people," making it possible for others to identify with them and look up to them at the same time. People expect their leaders to be powerful and active, but not necessarily good. Many social and biological factors, including socialization, experience, and testosterone, conspire to make a leader a rogue or a hero, but somewhere along the line he or she will have become a person who is out of the ordinary.
Ashoka, a leader in India in the third century
B.C.
, went a step beyond the experiences common to most men. As a young man, Ashoka went to war and led an army that killed a hundred thousand people. When he grew older, he decided that war was wrong and he would rule by right conduct alone, or "Dharma." His influence in promoting compassion, tolerance, gentleness, and truthfulness extended to the twentieth century and influenced the life of Mahatma Gandhi.
13
South African President Nelson Mandela's prison experience transformed him. He is a contemporary example of a leader who has gone beyond the experience of ordinary men. Senator Bob Kerry is another. In 1969, recovering from war wounds in a Philadelphia naval hospital, Kerry made up his mind to do what he could to spare the next generation from what he'd been through in Vietnam.
Belonging and Behaving
Initiations controlled and shaped our impulses throughout much of history, but today something more is needed. Initiations work well when
 
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there are simple things to learn, such as whom to love or hate, what values to honor, how to act in important ceremonies, and how to treat one's enemy. As the world gets more complicated, it takes longer to learn all the things we need to know. It takes only a few hundred hours to master most complex skills. One can solo an airplane, for example, after ten to twelve hours of training and become a fair pilot after a hundred hours of practice. But learning to be an accountant, surgeon, lawyer, business executive, or college professor takes at least ten years of intensive study and practice to acquire the memory store to reach "world-class" performance.
14
Finding one's place in modern society is a long, drawn-out initiation rite that takes motivation, fortitude, years in school, and good control of rambunctious impulses. Strong and stable social institutions teach us what to do and how to control our impulses, including our impulses that come from testosterone.
The study of 4,662 military veterans showed how important social control is. In Chapter 4, I said that veterans in the top 10 percent of the testosterone distribution misbehaved more than othersthey had more trouble with the law, hard drug use, and marijuana use. In order to see how social differences might affect these findings, I looked at education and income. People who have more education and higher incomes are said to be higher in socioeconomic status, or "SES." I classified veterans who were below average in both income and education as low in SES, and those who were above average in both as high in SES. I dropped about a third of the veterans who were above average on one and below average on the other, but the remaining two-thirds made up two distinctly different groups.
Overall, there was a negative relationship between testosterone and SES. High-testosterone men were twice as likely to be in the low than in the high SES group, as described in Chapter 6. Looking at the data further, I saw something even more interesting in the relation involving testosterone, SES, and delinquency. Although there were high-testosterone men in both SES groups, testosterone was more strongly related to delinquency in the low than in the high-SES group. Figure 9.1 shows risk ratios in the two groups. As in Chapter 4, the risk ratio indicates how much more likely a behavior is among men with high than with normal testosterone levels. Figure 9.1 shows risk ratios separately for men in the low- and high-SES groups. The risks of adult delinquency
 
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Figure 9.1
Relation of male testosterone levels to misbehavior among low-and high-
socioeconomic-status (SES) men. The height of each column represents not the
number of men who engage in the behavior, but the risk ratio indicating the
likelihood of men in the top 10 percent of the testosterone distribution engaging
in the behavior, relative to men in the remaining 90 percent of the distribution.
The combination of high testosterone and low SES is associated with more
delinquency and hard drug use, but not more marijuana use.
and of hard drug use related to testosterone were about twice as high among low- than among high-SES men. On the other hand, the risk of marijuana use related to testosterone was about the same among low-and high-SES men.
The greatest misbehavior came from a combination of high testosterone and low SES. This suggests that SES can modify the effect of testosterone. Men who are high in SES and also high in testosterone may restrain themselves because they know they have more to lose. This appeared true for general adult delinquency and hard drug use, but marijuana use was related to testosterone similarly in low- and high-SES groups. This is probably because marijuana is openly accepted by so many people at all levels of society. Everyone knows it is illegal, but it is less frowned upon than hard drug use. High-testosterone men are relatively free to follow their wilder inclinations and use marijuana, regard-
 
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less of their SES status. Others studying this group of veterans have reached similar conclusions about how important social control forces are. Testosterone has fewer bad effects among men who are solidly embedded in social networks, men who grow up with strong parental support and have high levels of formal education, stable marriages, steady jobs, and numerous friends and social contacts.
15
Social control forces may affect young people even more than adults, particularly adolescents who are in a state of transition when their physical growth is almost complete and their hormones are approaching adult levels. They are no longer children but not yet quite adults. Adolescents are at a stage when they are leaving their parents for longer periods of time and spending more time with others. There have been several studies of testosterone in adolescents. One, a Norwegian study of sixteen-year-old boys, found testosterone related to physical aggression, especially in response to threat.
16
A North Carolina study of fourteen-to sixteen-year-old boys found testosterone related to getting drunk, smoking cigarettes, cutting school, having sex, and smoking marijuana, but also found the effects of testosterone depended on the young person's background. Testosterone had a less negative effect among boys who were involved in school and community activities and had a positive attitude toward home.
17
Testosterone may affect adolescents more because they have not yet learned to control it, which makes parental guidance and community involvement important to all young people, not just those with extremely high testosterone levels. A recent syphilis epidemic among upper-middle-class high school students in a metro-Atlanta county made this point dramatically. On a
Frontline
program titled "The Lost Children of Rockdale County," Dr. Claire Sterk
18
described a community that gave too little social support to its young people. There were too few after-school programs, too few community-sponsored activities for teens, and too little supervision from ambitious, hardworking parents. A group of Rockdale teens, with some of the girls as young as 13, were bored and rebellious, and they began congregating after school in homes where there were no adults present. The gatherings turned into drinking parties and then into large drunken sex orgies. At first, many of the girls viewed their initiation into sexual activity in the group setting as a coming-of-age event, which gave them special status. Later, as some
 
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of the older boys in the group instigated more extreme sexual behavior, including three boys having simultaneous sex with one girl, the girls became less comfortable with the parties. Even before the syphilis outbreak, the girls began to feel as though they'd lost control of the situation. Even if the leaders of the group were higher than average in testosterone, the extreme behavior of the group probably had much more to do with environmental than biological factors.
Perhaps parents in Rockdale County should consider what leaders in some African-American communities around the country are doing. They are adapting traditional rites of passage to contemporary American life. These rites-of-passage programs, with the goal of equating manhood with prosocial values, encourage high standards for behavior, wholesome activities, and community service. Psychologist Rhoderick Watts of DePaul University said, "Telling young black men what is needed to make the transition into manhood effectively contributes to their socialization process and gives them a sense of responsibility as they move into adulthood."
19
What he says applies to young people of all colors, and with "womanhood" substituted for "manhood," it applies to girls as well as boys.
In the absence of positive social influences, especially for adolescents, testosterone increases impulsiveness, interferes with self-control, and leads toward delinquency. Socializing forces are also important in determining whether adolescent misbehavior will lead to adult problems. The veterans data show that social integration had its greatest positive effect on high-testosterone men who had been juvenile delinquents.
20
Low-testosterone men tend to behave well regardless of their environment. High-testosterone men and boys need the social control that goes with family and community life. They will resist it, but they will benefit from it.
Belonging to a group makes one consider others in the group and try to do what the others think is right. Often this results in good behavior, but not always. The "lost children of Rockdale County" belonged to a group that encouraged risky behavior. Belonging to a criminal family or to a group of skinheads could make a person even more delinquent. Some male groups promote attitudes conducive to rape. Sexual assault is reported to be more common among athletes in team sports than among athletes in individual sports.
21
The pursuit of feelings of power
 
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and status in some fraternities has led to group sexual assault.
22
Belonging to a group means acting as the group thinks you should act. When an individual misbehaves according to the standards of the larger society, the behavior is often consistent with the standards of a nonconforming group.
Among college students, few studies have found testosterone related to aggression, violence, or other serious misbehavior, despite pockets of bad behavior in this population.
23
College students encounter many social control forces, which tend to restrain the effects of testosterone. Because of this, testosterone that might cause problems in a criminal population may have little effect among college students. At the other extreme from college students, individuals who are intoxicated, or too young to have learned how to behave, may show large effects of testosterone. In a preliminary study of a group of recovering alcoholics, I found that those who were higher in testosterone reported fighting more when intoxicated but not when sober. This is similar to what was found among squirrel monkeys, who fought more when they were given a combination of testosterone to make them aggressive and alcohol to reduce their inhibitions.
24
With animals or people, look out for high-testosterone drunks. I have also begun to examine children, who have very little testosterone but also very little experience in dealing with it. Initial findings, as reported in Chapter 4, indicate that testosterone can be related to aggressive behavior even among five- to eleven-year-old boys.
25
Too Many Men?
Sometimes in groups, particularly in informal and predominantly male groups, the effects of testosterone seem to be collective. The roughness of male life is indicated by fragments of pottery from American Indian villages. In permanent settlements, where women were present, there were a variety of bowls in different sizes. In war camps, where there were no women to bring refinement to the dinner hour, the men ate out of a few large bowls.
26
Sometimes in mostly male families, home life takes on some of the roughness of a war camp. When our boys were little, we had a neighbor with a husband and three sons. She really wanted a daughter. She once exclaimed to Mary, who had some sympathy for

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