Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (6 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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doorway, staring at the pole and threatening it. In the afternoon he let the group back outside, but he and the beta male continued to watch the pole and threaten it from time to time.
1
The scientists at Yerkes were studying animal social activity, which turns out to be complex. Beyond caring about food, sex, and danger, monkeys have a primitive society and a capacity for altruism. Like people, they pass experience down from generation to generation. They learn from each other. They have friends and enemies, and they keep track of many relationships at once. A young female is likely to grow up dominant if her mother is dominant. A strong monkey will respect a weak monkey if the weak one has strong allies.
Although social activity was the focus of their studies, the scientists also paid attention to biological factors, including testosterone. In the world of monkeys, it was easy to see nature and nurture working together. Testosterone led to fighting, and to sex, too, which was often the point of the fight. Winning fights and having sex led to more testosterone. When a male monkey won a fight, his testosterone increased; when he lost a fight, it dropped. Defeated monkeys withdrew and looked depressed. Sex therapy helped them. Their testosterone levels returned to normal when they were moved away from other males and placed among friendly females. With less testosterone, the alpha male might not have been aggressive enough to fight and intimidate his way to the top of the hierarchy, or bold enough to protect his troop from the totem pole threat. Testosterone helps a monkey gain power, and the support of influential friends or a socially prominent family helps him stay in power.
The emphasis on biology made research at Yerkes different from most research on human behavior. Scientists studying people have tended to keep biology and behavior separate, perhaps because scientists, like most people, like to think their minds operate a rung or two above their glands and the rest of their bodies. After my trip to Yerkes, I thought about how the differences between animal and human research were consistent with the attitudes I grew up with on the farm. Maybe trying to rise above nature meant pretending nature was not important. I began to wonder more about physiological factors among people, particularly testosterone. Testosterone influenced the way farm animals and monkeys behaved. Could it play a role in human barroom fights, marital conflict, war, or national leadership? Did it change with
 
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winning and losing, as it did with the monkeys? Did it affect women as well as men? Babies produce testosterone before they are born. Could testosterone affect the behavior of newborn infants and children?
Manhood and Womanhood
Finally, the monkeys' concern for each other made me wonder about culture and the nature of manhood and womanhood. Manhood is not the same as masculinity, and womanhood is not the same as femininity. Masculinity and femininity are psychological characteristics that evolved to support the demands of being male or female. Masculinity is a frame of mind consistent with the need to compete with other males and attract females. Femininity is a frame of mind consistent with the need to acquire resources to support offspring. Most psychological literature describes masculinity in terms of competition and femininity in terms of nurturing.
Manhood and womanhood are masculinity and femininity acculturated and directed toward the needs of society. Manhood and womanhood are more culturally varied and less rooted in biology than masculinity and femininity. For men, with their high testosterone levels and combative tendencies, manhood varies as masculinity is harnessed and directed toward demands that differ from culture to culture, though manhood is always less self-centered than masculinity. Womanhood varies from culture to culture, too, but it usually involves nurturing, cooperation, and a degree of selflessness in the interest of offspring and the larger community.
It is generally assumed that animals can be masculine or feminine but only people can be manly or womanly. The more I learn about animal research, however, the less sure I feel about the uniquely human quality of manhood and womanhood. Animals are often selfless in helping their offspring and their groups. Hikers know to give wide berth to mother bears, who will risk dangerous confrontations to protect their cubs. Like a mother bear defending her cub, the alpha monkey places the safety of his group ahead of his own safety. The stump-tailed macaque alpha male did this in trying to protect his group from the strange totem pole. He seemed to understand that obligations go along with the perks of office. Among people, being willing to sacrifice per-
 
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sonal comfort to help others and act for the good of the group is part of manhood, as it is of womanhood.
The culture of people differs from that of animals primarily in its complexity and in the training and initiation it requires of new members. Initiations, like the ones Masai boys must go through before they become warriors and Masai girls must go through before they marry, define the standards of manhood and womanhood in a society. Although initiation ceremonies sometimes force new members into rigid roles according to sex, they also channel the energy of testosterone into prosocial activities, as prosocial is defined by their particular cultures. While rigid sex roles have outlived their usefulness in most parts of the world, prosocial attitudes have not.
The Japanese are moving into the new century with initiation rites in place. According to T.R. Reid, author of
Confucius Lives Next Door
, ''Every January 15th, in every little town, big city, hamlet in Japan, every person who's gonna turn 20 that year goes down to the town hall and is admitted to the rank of adulthood. This means now whatyou can drink legally, you can bet at the race track, you can vote, and it also means you have a lot of responsibility. And these kids pack in there and get lectures about their responsibility."
2
Unlike in Japan, there is no universal rite of passage in the United States. Bar mitzvahs, hell weeks, military basic training, sorority initiations, and society debuts define manhood and womanhood for selected groups of young people, but many others enter the adult world without ceremony. Partly out of a desire not to restrain our children too much, we often fail to teach them how to be responsible adults. Street gangs, deadbeat parents, and neglected children may be the price we pay for that. The animal qualities within us, including qualities associated with testosterone, require direction and control.
Starting the Project
These issues seemed to me to deserve more study. Testosterone might tell us something important about how to deal with the problems of the world. I worked on a proposal and approached the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation seeking money for research. These agencies were interested, I think owing both to a
 
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national concern with violence and an uneasy public tension between feminism and the men's movement. The time was right to try for a better understanding of testosterone in men and women alike, and the federal agencies and my own university provided the funds I would need.
In my lifetime, people have changed in how they view the world. Biologists write more about similarities among species. A new environmental awareness emphasizes the interrelationship of all life. We hear about the importance of links between people and the rest of nature. People seem close enough to other animals to share some of their qualities. In ancient Greece, an inscription at the Oracle at Delphi advised, "Know thyself." Most of us would like to know more about our roots, and our roots are biological as well as social and political. Our bodies are animal bodies. Our brains, as complex as they are, have animal origins. Our thoughts and emotions are nudged about by hormones that are the same as the hormones that affect other animals.
I do not believe people are like animals. I believe people are animals, of a special kind. They stand out as unique from other animals. But deep down, underneath human nature, people are understandable only if we consider the qualities they share with animals. That doesn't mean we have to become biological determinists. On the contrary, understanding human nature improves our chances for doing what needs to be done to make the best of it. Biology is only part of destiny.
Understanding Behavior
Social psychologists study social relationships, which include our loves and hates, how we make friends and enemies, and how we make decisions about each other. Social psychologists explain people's behavior by their backgrounds, surroundings, and personalities. Over the past decade I have done this, but I have added testosterone and other hormones to the usual social variables. My students and I have studied testosterone measures from more than eight thousand men, women, and children, and I am convinced that what we and others are learning will fill a gap in our understanding of social behavior.
Testosterone is a small molecule with large effects, which can be moderated by environmental factors, including parenting and education. It is related to things as diverse as criminal violence and the way
 
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people smile. It affects our ability with language and our ability to navigate in space. It helps predict what occupation we will enter and whether or not we will marry, have extramarital affairs, or divorce. Testosterone is present in both sexes, and it affects men and women in similar ways. Although testosterone is considered a male hormone and the average man produces eight to ten times as much as the average woman, the average man is not necessarily eight to ten times more masculine than the average woman. Testosterone is only part of a complicated chemical profile that seems to result in women being more sensitive to small amounts of testosterone than men.
There is a great deal of variation in testosterone and its effect on personality and behavior among individuals of both sexes. Nevertheless testosterone, along with other biological factors and cultural influences, may explain why some personality traits and behavior patterns occur more frequently in men than in women. Researchers usually suspect that when a trait is found much more often among men than women, testosterone partly explains the difference. The role of testosterone is clearer, however, when a particular trait is found more often among higher-than lower-testosterone individuals of the same sex. This book is the story of what we know and what we are learning about testosterone, a part of the animal within us all.
This book is within the context of science, which is both creative and critical. Science is about the larger world. It examines phenomena inside and outside the laboratory. It works best by drawing ideas from many directions, keeping the ideas that bear up under scrutiny and letting the others go. Knowledge comes in small pieces that scientists slowly put together in a puzzle that is always growing and always changing.
3
The chapters that follow describe the pieces of the testosterone puzzle that are in place and offer a few educated guesses about where the next pieces might go. The chapters are both factual and speculative, and I have done my best to distinguish the two. The book presents the current state of knowledge about testosterone and behavior at the turn of the twenty-first century, speculates about how this knowledge might apply to as yet untested areas, and offers examples and anecdotes intended to animate the charts and statistics in the book. It is my hope that the material in its totality will convey the excitement of research that both draws upon and informs our everyday life.
 
Page 1
PART ONE
HUMAN NATURE
 
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1
The Animal Within
Rascals, Heroes, and Colorful People
Sylvia Cross pushed her piano out into McLendon Avenue, smashed it apart with a hammer, and distributed the pieces among her friends who'd stayed for the grand finale of the last all-night party at Sylvia's Atomic Café. Business had been slow because a sinkhole had closed the street. Sylvia was bored and ready for a career change. She decided to go into art. She bought another piano and opened a new store, Sylvia's Art of This Century, an art supply boutique with musical entertainment in the evening. The last time I saw Sylvia, she was ready for another career change. She was planning to go on the Internet as an erotic storyteller.
Sylvia has a high-testosterone approach to life. She is a showperson and entrepreneur, and she deals with problems directly and flamboyantly. A few years ago she wanted to buy a house but didn't have money for the down payment. She solved the problem by having parties and selling tickets to her friends. Parties come naturally to Sylvia, and before the sinkhole, Sylvia's Atomic Café was an ongoing party in northeast Atlanta. It featured informal entertainment, often provided by Sylvia herself. One of the tricks she performed was fire-eating, which she'd learned from a circus performer.
While Sylvia was still in the restaurant business, a friend of mine who was a friend of hers told me Sylvia would make a good subject for the testosterone research I was doing. Sylvia told my friend she would be glad to participate if I let her know the results. When the lab finished her assay, I marked her score on a graph along with the scores of a group

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