There is No Simple Link between Testosterone and Violence - Building Gender Balanced Business

• It is too simplistic to equate violent behaviour in human males to the levels of testosterone in their bloodstream, wrote Robert Sapolsky for Discover Magazine.
• You can increase the levels of the hormone from anywhere between 20% above normal to twice as much as normal and the result will be the same level of aggressiveness.
• Further, there is evidence that social conditioning has an influence over aggressiveness.
• In an experiment with monkeys, one monkey’s testosterone’s levels were increased to see if it would challenge other monkeys higher up in the pecking order. In fact, it stayed in the same position in the hierarchy, only this time it was a “total bastard” towards the two monkeys below. “Testosterone isn’t causing aggression,” wrote Sapolsky, “it’s exaggerating the aggression that’s already there.”
• Finally, he refers to the strange case of the spotted hyenas where the females are more muscular and aggressive, largely it would seem because of generations of social conditioning to which their bodies had responded, stoked not on testosterone but androgens.

Source: Testosterone rules by Robert Sapolsky, March 1, 1997, Discover Magazine