Intranasal oxytocin, testosterone reactivity, and human competitiveness

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Oxytocin.

Salivary T concentrations (n = 197) were measured throughout the task to assess endogenous reactivity.

Why It Was Studied

Competitiveness is an essential feature of human social interactions.

Despite an extensive body of research on the underlying psychological and cultural factors regulating competitive behavior, the role of biological factors remains poorly understood.

Who Took Part

According to the abstract, 204 subjects were involved.

PubMed tags the participants as both men and women.

In a double-blind placebo-control design, 204 subjects (102 females) self-administrated OT or placebo and were assessed for their willingness to compete via an extensively-validated economic laboratory competition paradigm, in which, before completing a set of incentivized arithmetic tasks, subjects are asked to decide what percentage of their payoffs will be based on tournament paying-scheme.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Oxytocin and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

As a double-blind Oxytocin study, the assignments were hidden from both participants and investigators until the end.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Oxytocin group a baseline to be compared against.

What Was Measured

Here, the researchers examined if intranasal administration of the neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) - a key regulator of human social behavior and cognition - interacts with changes in endogenous testosterone (T) levels in regulating the willingness to engage in competition.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Competitive Behavior, Motivation, Oxytocin and Testosterone.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Competitiveness, Neurohormones, Sex differences and Testosterone reactivity.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Oxytocin in 204 subjects.

The publication is from 2021 (Psychoneuroendocrinology), a journal based in England.

More context: the Oxytocin compound page, all human trials.