People who were rooting for Mitt Romney during the 2012 US presidential election showed acute increases in testosterone after watching him lose to Barack Obama. Moreover, this increase in testosterone was associated with a harsher evaluation of Obama. These findings were published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.
Presidential elections offer an opportunity to explore intergroup competition and how people react when their group’s status is threatened. The biosocial model of status suggests that status changes are accompanied by physiological reactions. For example, winning a competition increases status, which boosts the release of testosterone — a hormone associated with dominance and assertiveness. Losing a competition instead threatens one’s status and decreases testosterone.
There is some evidence for this pattern of hormonal changes among voters in elections, with supporters of winning candidates showing increases in testosterone following election results. Study authors Smrithi Prasad and her team wondered how such shifts in testosterone might impact citizens’ attitudes toward the elected leader. For example, the researchers proposed that a status threat might lead supporters of a losing candidate to attempt to regain their status by derogating the winning candidate.
The researchers conducted a field study during the 2012 US presidential election, to explore how partisans’ testosterone levels and attitudes toward the elected leader may have shifted following the election results. They focused their study on supporters of the two main contenders for the election, leaving a sample of 33 Romney supporters and 62 Obama supporters.
Participants’ testosterone levels were assessed via at-home saliva sampling during election night. Additional saliva samples were collected on the days before and after the election result. Participants also completed surveys that assessed attitudes toward the elected president, Obama, before and after the election.
The results revealed that supporters of Obama experienced decreases in testosterone during election night, while supporters of the losing candidate, Romney, experienced increases in testosterone and flatter diurnal testosterone slopes.
For supporters of Romney, changes in testosterone were associated with changes in attitudes toward Obama. Specifically, among Romney supporters, greater spikes in testosterone and flatter diurnal testosterone slopes predicted less favorable attitudes toward Obama following the election. Conversely, smaller increases in testosterone and steeper diurnal slopes among Romney supporters predicted more favorable attitudes toward Obama. Among those who were rooting for Obama, testosterone reactions were not found to moderate changes in attitudes.
The authors note that these findings contradict the results from a previous study assessing testosterone responses to the 2008 election. The previous study, conducted by Stanton and colleagues (2009), found a stronger decrease in testosterone among supporters of the losing candidate, not the winning candidate. Prasad and her colleagues suggest that there may be moderators at play that are impacting testosterone responses.
One moderator might be the tightness of the competition. Past research suggests that testosterone may be more likely to increase among the winning side when the winner is seen to dominate by a large margin (such as in the 2008 election) rather than a close call (such as in the 2012 election). “In the 2012 election, testosterone increases among Romney supporters may be attributed to the expectation of a close race,” the study authors say. “In this context, increased testosterone concentrations could reflect a motivation to regain status that is lost after an unexpected defeat.”
The researchers say their findings offer insight into the biology behind intergroup competition, by suggesting that “hormonal responses to large-scale intergroup competitions may shape how we perceive our elected leaders.”
The study, “Testosterone fluctuations in response to a democratic election predict partisan attitudes toward the elected leader”, was authored by Smrithi Prasad, Erik L. Knight, Amar Sarkar, Keith M. Welker, Bethany Lassetter, and Pranjal H. Mehta.
