Under the influence: exogenous testosterone influences men’s cross-sex perceptions of sexual interest
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The sexual misperception bias is a cognitive bias in which men tend to overestimate sexual interest from women, potentially shaped by evolutionary mating strategies. Testosterone, often linked to mating behaviors, might play a role in sustaining sexual overperceptions. To explore this possibility, we conducted a placebo-controlled study with 190 heterosexual men, administering either 11 mg of testosterone or a placebo. Participants interacted with an attractive female confederate, while naïve raters assessed the confederate's affiliative behaviors. Our findings suggest that exogenous testosterone did not broadly impact sexual overperception. However, we found that affiliative behavior from the confederate was positively correlated with perceived sexual interest among testosterone-treated, but not placebo-treated men. In addition, we found that this effect among testosterone-treated men was contingent on their self-perceived attractiveness. Specifically, the confederate's affiliative behaviors were positively correlated with perceived sexual interest, but only for testosterone-treated men with average or above average self-perceived attractiveness. Furthermore, our data revealed that men's tendency to project their own short-term and long-term mating interests increases as a function of self-perceived attractiveness, and this coupling is enhanced by testosterone for long-term interest. Taken together, these results suggest that testosterone may potentiate existing biases, particularly when sexual motivation is high, and bias perceptions of friendly behavior when engaging in cross-sex mindreading. This study adds to the understanding of the neuroendocrine bases of social cognition, suggesting that testosterone can affect men's perceptions of potential mates.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".