Department of Sociology/ICS, Utrecht University, Padualaan 14, 3584 CH Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Nuffield College, University of Oxford, New Road, Oxford OX1 1NF, United Kingdom.
Sci Rep. 2016 Jun 10;6:27655. doi: 10.1038/srep27655.
Animal research has established that effects of hormones on social behaviour depend on characteristics of both individual and environment. Insight from research on humans into this interdependence is limited, though. Specifically, hardly any prior testosterone experiments in humans scrutinized the interdependency of testosterone with the social environment. Nonetheless, recent testosterone administration studies in humans repeatedly show that a proxy for individuals' prenatal testosterone-to-estradiol ratio, second-to-fourth digit-ratio (2D:4D ratio), influences effects of testosterone administration on human social behaviour. Here, we systematically vary the characteristics of the social environment and show that, depending on prenatal sex hormone priming, testosterone administration in women moderates the effect of the social environment on trust. We use the economic trust game and compare one-shot games modelling trust problems in relations between strangers with repeated games modelling trust problems in ongoing relations between partners. As expected, subjects are more trustful in repeated than in one-shot games. In subjects prenatally relatively highly primed by testosterone, however, this effect disappears after testosterone administration. We argue that impairments in cognitive empathy may reduce the repeated game effect on trust after testosterone administration in subjects with relatively high prenatal testosterone exposure and propose a neurobiological explanation for this effect.
动物研究已经证实，激素对社会行为的影响取决于个体和环境的特征。然而，人类对这种相互依存关系的研究洞察力有限。具体来说，几乎没有任何先前的人类睾丸激素实验仔细研究了睾丸激素与社会环境的相互依存关系。尽管如此，最近人类睾丸激素给药研究一再表明，个体产前睾丸激素与雌二醇比值的代表，第二到第四指骨比（2D:4D 比），影响睾丸激素给药对人类社会行为的影响。在这里，我们系统地改变社会环境的特征，并表明，根据产前性激素启动，女性睾丸激素给药调节社会环境对信任的影响。我们使用经济信任游戏，并比较单次游戏模型在陌生人之间的信任问题与重复游戏模型在合作伙伴之间持续关系中的信任问题。正如预期的那样，与单次游戏相比，受试者在重复游戏中更信任。然而，在产前相对较高地被睾丸激素启动的受试者中，这种效应在睾丸激素给药后消失。我们认为，认知同理心的损害可能会降低重复游戏对信任的影响，而在产前暴露于较高睾丸激素的受试者中，我们提出了一种神经生物学解释这种效应。
