Scientists uncover disturbing effect of testosterone on men’s view of conservatively dressed women

A recent study published in Psychoneuroendocrinology offers new insights into how testosterone influences men’s perceptions of women. While sexualized women are often dehumanized based on their appearance, the researchers discovered that elevated testosterone levels also lead men to dehumanize women dressed conservatively, even in the absence of sexualization cues. This finding highlights how physiological changes, such as increased testosterone, can alter the way men perceive women.

Dehumanization is a harmful process where individuals are stripped of qualities that make them uniquely human, such as emotions and moral capacity. Research has shown that sexualization plays a significant role in how people perceive women. Both men and women are more likely to dehumanize women who are sexualized by wearing revealing clothing.

However, little was known about whether physiological factors like testosterone could contribute to this behavior. Testosterone has been linked to social behaviors, including aggression and sexual impulsivity. Given that men’s testosterone levels increase after interacting with women or being exposed to sexual stimuli, the researchers wanted to explore whether a surge in testosterone could lead to dehumanization even without sexualization.

“Research in social psychology has shown that sexualized women are often dehumanized—meaning they are attributed fewer human qualities. This process can have extremely negative consequences for women’s wellbeing, because dehumanized women are more likely to become victims of sexual or physical aggression and are more likely to be victim-blamed as well,” explained study author Francesca Luberti, who completed the research while a postdoctoral fellow at Nipissing University.

“Given these harmful outcomes, it’s important to understand the mechanisms that lead to the dehumanization of women. We were interested in contributing to this effort by investigating whether physiological factors, such as increases in testosterone levels, play a role in men’s dehumanization of sexualized and non-sexualized women.”

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To investigate the relationship between testosterone and dehumanization, the researchers conducted a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment. A total of 120 healthy young men between the ages of 18 and 38 were recruited for the study. Participants were either students or members of the community, and most identified as heterosexual. The researchers excluded participants with conditions or medications that could affect hormone levels, ensuring that the results would not be skewed by other variables.

The participants attended two experimental sessions, spaced two weeks apart. In one session, they received a dose of testosterone, while in the other, they received a placebo. The testosterone was administered via a nasal gel, which is known to raise testosterone levels quickly.

To measure how testosterone affected dehumanization, participants watched a video of a woman who was either dressed conservatively or in a more revealing, sexualized outfit. Each participant watched the same version of the video in both sessions. The woman in the video was filmed answering interview-style questions in a neutral manner, allowing the researchers to isolate the effects of testosterone and clothing style.

After watching the video, participants completed a series of tasks to assess different forms of dehumanization. First, they engaged in an emotion-based dehumanization task, where they rated the extent to which the woman could experience emotions that are either uniquely human, such as remorse and hope, or emotions shared with animals, like fear and excitement.

Next, they participated in a personality-based dehumanization task, where they evaluated the woman’s personality traits, distinguishing between traits that are uniquely human, such as openness to experience, and those common to both humans and animals, like neuroticism.

Finally, participants completed a perceptual dehumanization task, in which they were asked to recognize faces presented either upright or upside down. This task measured the degree to which they processed faces holistically (configurally) versus feature-by-feature, with less holistic processing indicating higher levels of dehumanization.

The researchers found that testosterone had a specific effect on emotion-based dehumanization. Men who took testosterone attributed fewer uniquely human emotions to the conservatively dressed woman compared to men who took the placebo. In other words, testosterone increased emotion-based dehumanization toward the conservatively dressed woman by reducing the extent to which men believed she could experience human-specific emotions, like hope and remorse.

Interestingly, the results for the sexualized woman were different. Men dehumanized the woman in the sexualized video regardless of whether they had received testosterone or the placebo. This suggests that the mere presence of sexualization cues was enough to trigger dehumanization in both conditions, and that testosterone did not exacerbate this effect.

“We were definitely surprised to find that testosterone did not further increase emotion-based dehumanization toward a sexualized woman, as we had predicted, but instead led to the emotion-based dehumanization of a non-sexualized woman,” Luberti told PsyPost.

The study did not find that personality traits or biological factors, such as the androgen receptor gene, moderated the effects of testosterone on dehumanization. This suggests that testosterone’s effects on dehumanization might be consistent across most men.

“We found that, if the target woman was sexualized, men engaged in emotion-based dehumanization toward her regardless of their testosterone levels, but if she was not sexualized, they only engaged in this form of dehumanization when their testosterone levels were elevated by a single dose of intranasal testosterone,” Luberti explained. “Based on these results, the takeaway message is that sexualization leads to emotion-based dehumanization toward a target woman, but heightened testosterone levels can trigger this type of dehumanization even in the absence of sexualization cues.”

In addition, testosterone did not affect the other two forms of dehumanization. Men’s ratings of the woman’s personality traits did not change based on the drug or the video they watched, meaning that testosterone did not influence personality-based dehumanization. Similarly, testosterone did not impact perceptual dehumanization, as men’s ability to recognize faces did not differ between the conditions.

“We also didn’t expect to find that testosterone and sexualization would affect emotion-based dehumanization but not personality-based and perceptual dehumanization,” Luberti told PsyPost. “These findings suggest that testosterone may have nuanced effects on dehumanization and that it may only contribute to certain forms of dehumanization toward women. Further research should investigate why that is the case.”

“Additionally, we did not measure other types of dehumanization, like attributions of agency, which researchers have often found to be affected by sexualization. It would be interesting to test whether testosterone influences these types of dehumanization as well. Lastly, I should note that the sample of this experiment mostly consisted of young, heterosexual men living in Canada, so one should be cautious about generalizing these findings to other populations.”

Overall, this research highlights a novel physiological mechanism contributing to dehumanization, but testosterone is only one piece of the puzzle. “While this experiment provides new evidence that testosterone may contribute to men’s emotion-based dehumanization of women, it is important to highlight the fact that testosterone is just one factor,” Luberti said. “To fully understand the mechanisms behind the dehumanization of women, it will be essential to consider how several physiological and socio-cultural factors interact with each other to shape this behavior.”

The study, “Testosterone rapidly increases men’s emotion-based dehumanization of a conservatively dressed woman,” was authored by Francesca R. Luberti, Valentina Proietti, Shawn N. Geniole, Brian M. Bird, Triana L. Ortiz, Neil V. Watson, Jessica Cearns, Bernard Goldfarb, and Justin M. Carré.