Does testosterone make you a big dumb oak making unnecessary risks? Well, some researchers set to find out, and found some interesting conclusions.

Observations: Testosterone bumps up status-seeking behavior, not aggressive risk-taking

Do those with more testosterone coursing through their bodies make riskier, more aggressive decisions? Popular culture and even rodent studies seem to have borne out this trite truism about the sex hormone, but researchers in Switzerland and the U.K. tested whether this perception really held true for humans in a controlled environment—and arrived at counter-intuitive findings.
Those who had received testosterone actually made “significantly higher offers” than those who had gotten the placebo (offering an average of 39 percent of the money and 34 percent, respectively)—even after controlling for baseline testosterone levels and perceived testosterone consumption, the paper authors noted. These testosterone-fueled offers worked, “thereby reducing bargaining conflicts and increasing the efficiency of social interactions,” the researchers wrote. They attributed this shift to a desire of the testosterone group to maintain their images—by avoiding rejection—aligning with the so-called social status hypothesis.

But might the different bargaining approach be based on an increase in altruism? The authors refute this explanation, noting that if this were the case they would have seen more offers accepted under the influence of testosterone (which they didn’t, finding, in fact no significant change in the ways the receivers responded to the offers when compared with a similar test of 180 women who had received no testosterone).

This study isn’t the first to cut away at some of the myths about testosterone. Previous research has found that although the hormone is often prevalent in violent individuals—both male and female—it alone doesn’t lead to violence.

A whole bunch of interesting findings. Of course, nothing is final, and no one study can be the end-all conclusion of what testosterone does, but its fun seeing so many myths about testosterone shattered as of late.