Abstract
Testosterone (T) fluctuates in response to competitive social interactions, with the direction of change typically depending on factors such as contest outcome. Watching a competition may be sufficient to activate T among fans and others who are invested in the outcome. This study explores the change in T associated with vicarious experiences of competition among combat sport athletes viewing a teammate win or lose and assesses how individual differences in social identification with one’s team relates to these patterns of T reactivity. Twenty-six male combat athletes completed a social identity questionnaire on a neutral day. Later, salivary samples (assayed for T) were obtained before and after athletes viewed a video of a teammate engaged in a formal contest. T reactivity to viewing a teammate compete varied among participants in both the magnitude and direction of change, independent of contest outcome. Individual differences in cognitive centrality, a core feature of social identification, showed a strong positive relationship with T reactivity, particularly if their teammate won. Initial findings suggest that dominance-linked androgen responses associated with watching a teammate win a competition might depend on the belief that team membership is central to one’s own identity. These exploratory results in a small sample of combat athletes should be interpreted with caution. Uncovering the role of social group dynamics in influencing T responses to competition is particularly important in light of the evolutionary history of coalitional combat in humans.
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De-identified data, analysis code, and supplementary results are publicly available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/tu6ns/).
Notes
Supplemental analyses of the small number of participants (n = 19) for whom we obtained cortisol levels (reported in https://osf.io/tu6ns/) showed that cortisol levels and reactivity were unrelated to competition outcome or any social identity variables.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by a Discovery Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN-2014- 06676) to JMC. This work was also supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (435-2016-059) to MB. The authors would like to thank the participating athletes and coaches for their cooperation.
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Casto, K.V., Root, Z.L., Geniole, S.N. et al. Exploratory Analysis of the Relationship between Social Identification and Testosterone Reactivity to Vicarious Combat. Hum Nat 32, 509–527 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-021-09407-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-021-09407-7