Testerone and Leadership

I have included a link to the recent press release and the working draft of a study done by several psychology professors at UT researching testosterone and leadership status. They begin with earlier research which has mainly focused on other animals, such as the Rohwer study of situations when a domainant sparrow has its feathers bleached and the submissive sparrowd had their feathers colored to represent a new dominant position. Even this alone was fascinating, seeing that the once-dominant sparrows engaged in aggressive bullying to regain their lost status while the once-submissive birds often left the flock to feed in solidude.

In short, the researchers found that when people were mismatched (i.e. high testosterone level in a low status and low testosterone in high status), they focused more on their status position and showed worse cognitive functioning. These findings seem to build upon previous findings that "naturally occurring levels of testosterone are correlated with position in the hierarchy, as well as with dominant behavior."

News Release 2/2005: Leadership status affects cognitive performance of people with higher testosterone levels

The study: http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/HomePage/Faculty/Josephs/pdf_documents/2004-0054-R-RJosephs.pdf

- posted by JW Walthall at 11:04 AM | Permanent Link | 0 comments