How testosterone administration affects social rank perceptions: A double-blind, placebo-controlled study

Abstract

Navigating social hierarchies is fundamental to human survival and reproductive success, relying heavily on the accurate perception of social rank. However, the neuroendocrine mechanisms underlying this perception remain largely uncharted. Given testosterone’s established role in status-seeking motivation, we examined whether and how exogenous testosterone modulates the perceptions of dominance and prestige, two primary strategies for achieving social rank. We employed a double-blind, placebo-controlled, between-subjects design involving 110 healthy male participants. After receiving either testosterone or a placebo, participants evaluated various nonverbal displays representing four distinct social signals (prestige, dominance, neutral, and smiling). We assessed their ultimate perceptions of the targets’ dominance and prestige, alongside their trait inferences of agency and communion, which were theorized to underpin social rank perceptions. Results indicated that testosterone, rather than exerting a significant main effect on the overall magnitude of explicit dominance and prestige judgements, exerted a selective and subtle influence on the underlying cognitive pathways. Specifically, testosterone diminished the reliance on the indirect pathways involving perceptions of communion when evaluating non-dominant signals. Conversely, the cognitive processing of dominance displays, which relies predominantly on agency, remained highly resilient to testosterone administration. These findings indicate that testosterone’s role in social rank perception is limited, subtly recalibrating the weighting of affiliative traits rather than biasing ultimate judgments. Crucially, the robustness of basic visual decoding in our study highlights that explicit verbal judgments of nonverbal displays may not be a sensitive signal carrier for observing testosterone’s effects on social cognitive processes.