Why Testosterone May Be the Real "Luxury Drug"

 


 
“You are what you buy,” our consumer culture seems to tell us. But how fixed and immutable are our buying preferences? How subject are they to chemical manipulation? This may sound like the premise for a paranoid and on-the-nose thriller about capitalism but it’s also the question raised by a recentcollaboration between Caltech, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, University of Western Ontario, and ZRT Laboratory.
And the results of that study suggest the answer is: very.
 
Researchers assembled 243 men between the ages of 18 and 55. Half were randomly dosed with testosterone, while the other half were given a placebo. 4 hours later, when the testosterone in their blood had nearly peaked, they were given several tasks.
First, the subjects were presented with a 10-point scale, featuring a brand with high social status on one end, and a brand with low status—but otherwise equal quality—on the other. The men were asked to move a slider towards their preferred brand—the farther the slider, the stronger their preference.
The results? The testosterone-dosed men showed a distinct lean towards the higher-status brand compared to the placebo group.
 
But did the testosterone make these men have a greater desire for luxury, or was it about a sense of power, or appreciation for quality? To isolate these variables, a second test was deployed.
This time, the men were presented with an ad for a luxury product. Some were shown an ad emphasizing its quality, some were shown an ad playing up its power, and a third group watched an ad driving home the concept of luxury. Afterwards, they ranked their attitude towards that product on a scale of one to ten.
 
Only the men subjected to the luxury-focused ad saw a difference between the testosterone group and the placebo. In other words, the results point to a direct relationship between wishing to acquire luxury goods and ingesting a dose of testosterone.
 
A few things to keep in mind before deciding that your testosterone level has doomed you to a life of longing after expensive cars and fancy watches: first, a person’s testosterone levels naturally fluctuate throughout the day. Something as simple as watching your sports team winning a home game can noticeably boost your testosterone levels—or, interestingly, consuming luxury goods.
Second, this test only focused on men. As the study itself notes, researchers carrying out these experiments should also look at the buying effects of testosterone on women.
Beyond that, “status” is a bit of a moving target as a concept, meaning different things to different people in different cultures and subgroups.
Still, food for thought. And remember, the next time you’re craving a pair of designer shades, it could just be the testosterone talking…
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Check out Robb’s new book and more
content at www.bestmindframe.com.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo...
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a...
Read more

The Top One Quality of True Leaders

Image
“So, what's up with the pile of words?” you ask. This is part of an experiment we conducted earlier this year on how to be the perfect leader. Sooner or later, most of us wind up in a position of some power, whether it’s running a cub scout den or a girl scout troop, heading up a committee at church or your job, or residing over your flamenco dance group or your flamingo lawn ornament club. And when you nobly accepted the challenge of being in charge, your brain released a little shot of cortisol, the stress hormone. In your moment of panic, you made the executive decision to discover the secret to being a good leader. If you were like me, you went down to your local bookstore and perused the aisles looking for books on leadership. After all, you wanted to be the best president the flamingo lawn ornament club had ever known, recognizing a club needs to be more than really swanky pink shirts. In my case, the bookstore anticipated my arrival and had at the ready a slew of...
Read more