Competing Sexes, Power, and Testosterone: How Winning and Losing Affect People's Empathic Responses and What this Means for Organisations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We introduce a biopsychosocial model to explain how men's and women's testosterone fluctuations ensuing from winning and losing status in intrasexual competitions affect their proactive and reactive aggression, as well as their accuracy at assessing others’ emotions (empathic accuracy) and anxiety at witnessing others’ pain (personal distress). We also propose that their empathic responses depend on the extent to which they are driven by a need to influence other people (implicit power motivation). To our knowledge, this is among the first articles to offer a comprehensive investigation of the physiological and psychological effects that competitive outcomes have on individuals' empathic responses. Given that competition is ubiquitous in organisational life, we sensitise practitioners to its effect on empathy in the workplace and give recommendations on how they could foster a healthy work environment. Finally, to encourage scholars along this research avenue, we provide concrete suggestions for empirically testing our model and advise them to probe other hormones, as well as other empathic responses and non‐hormonal mechanisms that may assist in further explaining the competition–empathy link.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".