Consumption on steroids: The effect of testosterone on preferences for conspicuous consumption and the moderating role of intrasexual competition
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In line with recent research suggesting that testosterone may only be related to decisions under specific conditions, we show that testosterone is associated with conspicuous consumption only when intrasexual competition is high. In three studies, we provide empirical evidence that prenatal and circulating testosterone are only related to conspicuous consumption when intrasexual competition is high. These findings are in line with recent literature that posits that testosterone is only related to particular decisions or behavior when status is at stake. In Study 1, we find that masculinized digit ratios (an indicator of high prenatal testosterone exposure) are only related to greater conspicuous consumption preferences for men that score high on an intrasexual competitiveness trait measure. In Study 2, we find that masculinized digit ratios are associated with greater conspicuous consumption preferences, but only among men who are primed with an intrasexual competition recall task. Finally, the purpose of Study 3 was to test if similar effects held when measuring circulating testosterone. We show that baseline levels of circulating testosterone are associated with greater conspicuous consumption preferences, but only after men are primed with intrasexual competition. Overall, we identify intrasexual competition as a crucial precondition for relationships between testosterone (prenatal and circulating) and conspicuous consumption to emerge. We argue that men with masculinized digit ratios and men with high circulating testosterone may be more likely to choose conspicuous products as a status‐signaling strategy in the mating market if they are inherently intrasexually competitive or when they encounter an intrasexually competitive situation.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it