Culture, Testosterone, & Cooperation

Study shows women are naturally better stewards of resources, while men's cooperation is dependent on their culture's gender roles

Let’s talk about this Harvard study demonstrating that women are naturally better credit risks and more trustworthy and cooperative stewards of resources than men.

The most interesting part of the findings show that men’s resource cooperation and trustworthiness were drastically affected by whether they were raised in a patriarchal or matrilineal culture, while women women remained steady regardless of the culture that defined their social status as equal or inferior to men.

Which makes sense, especially within the context of what we understand about testosterone.

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Contents of this article articulated as a video essay below - whether reading or watching is your preference, I got you!

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Before we break down this Harvard study, let’s watch this clip from Stanford professor and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky about how testosterone actually works [clip embedded below, text recap following].

@cocohasideasStudy shows women are naturally better + more cooperative stewards of resources than men are. Men’s capacities are dependent on their socialization, while women’s are not. Testosterone directs aggression to defend social status at all costs. Patriarchal societies produce less trustworthy + cooperative men, while matrilineal societies produce more cooperative and trustworthy men FULL CHAT ON Y T POWERCULTURECOCO #womenshealth #testosterone #feminineenergy #feminine #wnba #sephora #psychology #politicalpsychology #financialliteracy #divinefeminine

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So testosterone doesn’t make males aggressive, it drives males to do anything required to maintain their social status. In the example Professor Sapolsky provided, the male rhesus monkeys physically fight to create the dominance hierarchy of A is undefeated, B defeated C, but lost to A, and C only beat D and E.

When injected with high levels of testosterone, does monkey C start attacking A and B to climb the scale of dominance? No. Monkey C starts wailing on D and E - the lower status rivals whom he already conquered.

The additional testosterone didn’t generate more aggression and direct it towards status climbing, the additional testosterone made monkey C a nightmare to the lesser status monkeys instead.

Because testosterone drives males to protect and express their status aggressively. Focusing that aggression up the ladder to A and B would threaten his existing status and make him vulnerable to losing status.

Testosterone fuels aggression to defending social status as defined by the dominant value system of that culture. Cultures that reward aggression, promote aggression

Directing aggression towards lower status monkeys was an avenue to secure and reaffirm the monkey’s existing status.

Within humans, it’s more complicated since our constructs of social status are culturally taught and socialized. As Professor Sapolsky explains, we are socialized to reward aggression.

As he jokes, if a group of Buddhist monks were shot up with maximum testosterone, they would run amok doing random acts of kindness all over. Within their culture, the monks value the status of kindness, generosity, and care above conflict, material hoarding, and dominance.

Interesting, right? So testosterone fuels aggression to defending social status as defined by the dominant value system of that culture.

Testosterone within Patriarchal Values

So within patriarchy, men are raised to feel entitled to a higher status than all women, at all times. This social logic directs men’s aggression towards women, not each other, to reaffirm male entitlement to a higher social status than women.

If you want to demean a patriarchal man, you call him a woman or effeminate. The lowest status under patriarchy is femininity because femininity is seen as a dehumanized resource to exploit, not a social status participant.

Men who grow up in cultures that ban women from authority, autonomy, and social participation will direct their aggression towards subjugating women out of the public sphere.

These men respond emotionally and hormonally to women participating socially as equals or leaders because they feel their status is under threat.

Men raised within more matrilineal cultures where women hold the right to own property, exercise bodily autonomy, and experience social agency, demonstrate much more cooperative behaviors because they don’t internalize social participation as a status marker exclusive to men.

Meaning, they don’t feel innately and emotionally threatened by the mere social presence of women.

This indicates that the cultural logic of society - whether we value women as equal in humanity and social participation to men or subjugate women into an artificial inferior status - determines those men’s fundamental capacity for cooperative action.

Put another way, patriarchal values make men less cooperative and more aggressive towards women while matriarchal values make men more cooperative and socially productive members of society.

What Does the Harvard Study Show?

The Harvard study was looking at distinct cultures that participate in microfinance loans in Bangladesh.

Microfinance is where small loans are offered to rural and impoverished communities that lack financial services to see if access can disrupt cycles of extreme poverty.

Worldwide, 70% of microcredit recipients are women. Initially, these efforts didn’t specifically target women, they were offered to men to little success. Many men defaulted on the loans and there were no measurable reductions in poverty.

Spending on gambling, nightlife, and prostitution spending measurably increased in some regional studies, but there were no reductions in extreme poverty when men exclusively received the loans.

So, microfinance organizations began reaching out to women instead. They found that women were much more successful with repaying the loans and were much more likely to invest the loan in small businesses and cooperative improvements to benefit the larger community and rising generations.

Women prioritized investing in longterm resource security for their families and community initiatives that improved sanitation and health for all. Plus, many invested in health and education resources for children.

While microfinance isn’t a singular solution for disrupting poverty cycles, it has shown success and measurable reductions in extreme poverty in the hands of women.

This Harvard study sought to evaluate if women’s demonstrated success was the result of socialization or a reflection of something innate to women - the classic nature vs nurture argument.

The constructionist view argues that many micro loan recipients live within patriarchal societies where the loan was the only avenue for a woman to independently access resources. As such a rarified resource, she would of course be more responsible with it.

The nature view argues that there is something innate within women that drives them to be more trustworthy, cooperative, and logical stewards of resources than men.

How Did They Test This?

Researchers came up with a borrowing game where participants would be assigned to be an individual borrower or sorted into a group with joint loans. They’d play many rounds and players could choose to strategically default on repayment even if successful.

That’s the basics - I linked to the full research if you’d like to get into the weeds on methodology. To quote from the study:

“The researchers in this study compare repayment behavior of men and women who come from two distinct patrilineal and matrilineal societies that are culturally similar. These are the Khasi and the Patro communities in northeast Bangladesh.

The Khasi have a matrilineal family structure and a matrilocal residence system. Women are the heads of Khasi households, and children are known by their mother’s family names. Only female children among the Khasis inherit ancestral property, and a Khasi husband has no authority over decision-making or distribution of power.

The Khasis have lived side by side with members of another indigenous community, the Patro, for hundreds of years. The Patro community has a patriarchal family structure, in which males are considered to be household heads and the inheritors of property.”

They also had a 3rd community - located about 150 miles away from these - the Marma, which they considered gender neutral society and used as a control group.

Marma men carry on the family lineage, both male and female children have equal rights to ancestral property. Women live with their husbands’ families after marriage, but men have to pay a bridal price to the bride’s parents. For these and other reasons, the Marmas are considered to be a gender neutral

Findings

Women are better credit risks in both patriarchal and matrilineal societies, irrespective of whether the loan contracts stipulated joint or individual liability.

Across the entire sample, the average repayment rate of women was 17 percentage points higher than that of men. Indeed, the authors found that women participants had better repayment rates in every society.

Even when researchers controlled for age, education, marital status and assets, females were more likely to repay their loans regardless of their social group.

In the matrilineal society, the average repayment rate of women was 12 percentage points higher than the average repayment of men, controlling for demographic information.

In the patriarchal society, the average repayment rate of women was 30 percentage points higher than that of men, controlling for demographic information.

In the control group, i.e. the gender-neutral society, women were 18 percentage points more likely to repay than men, once again controlling for demographic information.

The repayment rate of men appeared to depend on what kind of society they were raised in: the average repayment rate of the men in the matrilineal society was 17.5 percentage points higher than that of the men in the patriarchal society, indicating a greater cooperative spirit in the former group.

Female borrowers display better repayment behavior than males, irrespective of the roles they play in society and the nature of the loan.

Men in matrilineal societies demonstrate much more cooperative behavior than do men in patriarchal societies, which results in higher repayment rates.”

While women are naturally more trustworthy stewards of resources, men’s capacity is largely determined by the culture they were raised in.

Testosterone, Status, and Cooperation

This tracks with what we learned about testosterone, right? That pesky hormone drives men to aggressively reinforce THEIR understanding of the social status and values they were raised within.

This phenomena is unique to men - women do not function like this. The problem is that we’ve attuned all of our cultural and social standards to patriarchy, which enables and rewards men’s worst hormonal impulses at the expense of women, children, and the stewardship of our own habitats.

Matrilineal means the family lineage and inheritance standards follow the mother’s line - children bear their mother’s names and women inherit ancestral property

This is separate from matriarchy.
Matriarchy is the social logic of centering family and social investments in service of children and rising generations

Patrilineal means the family lineage and inheritance standards follow the father’s line - children bear their father’s names and men inherit ancestral property

This is separate from patriarchy.
Patriarchy is the social logic of centering family and social investments to serve adult men

This research also helps explain why misogyny is getting WORSE. Men are aggressively and hormonally (emotionally) reacting to women’s independence as a violation to their social status entitlements.

The increase in aggression towards women, efforts to socially and politically subjugate women with the ultimate rightwing goal of forcing women out of social participation entirely, is a socialized and hormonal response.

As we all know, hormonal responses are not rational. They are primal, emotional, and dependent on perspective and feelings, not objective reality.

This is why patriarchal vs. matriarchal organizations determine the foundation of all social logic within culture. Patriarchal social logic centers family, social investments, and values in service of the fears and desires of adult men.

This creates fragility and aggression as dominant social norms where an insecure man can be hormonally triggered into aggression by merely witnessing a woman existing outside of the home.

Joel Webbon of the Right Response Ministries advocates for forcing women back into domestic servitude and banning women from all public participation for this very reason. To be clear, Webbon doesn’t want to see women holding jobs, posting on the internet, getting educations, or in any way living outside of domestic servitude as the property of men.

This helps explain some of the irrational patriarchal driven support for electing Trump again. Many claimed they were voting for Trump out of economic concerns - projecting a false sense of rationality from groups who didn’t bother to google what a tariff is before supporting it - when really, they were voting for the aggressive restoration of archaic gender norms to ensure men receive a higher social status than women.

They’re voting to receive higher social status as an entitlement from the state. They’re voting for state sponsored violence against women to soothe their hormonal reactions to witnessing women behave as humans, not the subhuman property of men.

The same people who believe the state has no role in facilitating humans cooperatively meeting basic needs together through proven programs like universal healthcare and mandating minimum wage requirements that ensure working full time equates to a livable salary - these same people are demanding that the state violently subjugates women to ensure men feel superior.

Instead of earning a higher social status through the value of their contributions, these patriarchal people demand that the state intervenes to bestow it upon them by engineering inferiority, desperation, and sadistic political punishments onto women.

Take Away

It’s critical that we do not falter in the face of backlash to feminism. Acquiescing to patriarchal demands for submission will not appease misogyny - it will only inspire the standards to become more depraved. It will only inspire men to behave with greater hostility, greater entitlement, and greater fragility.

It’s worth fighting for gender equality - and it’s critical for rising generations that we do this and help stop the cultural cycle of aggressive status entitlements that actually function to weaken men and sicken society.

We can’t change men’s biology, but we can create cultures of equity that support men in channeling their drive for status towards cooperative positives that help heal our families, cultures, economies, and environments. We create this through feminism - the political, social, and economic equality of the sexes - and accept nothing less.

Keep up the good fight, my friends.

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