How testosterone administration affects social rank perceptions: A double-blind, placebo-controlled study

A double-blind, placebo-controlled study found that testosterone did not significantly change the overall magnitude of healthy men’s explicit judgments of dominance and prestige in nonverbal social displays. Instead, administration selectively reduced reliance on communion-related processing when participants evaluated non-dominant signals, while agency-based processing of dominance displays remained highly resilient. The between-subjects experiment involved 110 healthy male participants who received either testosterone or a placebo.

Participants then evaluated nonverbal displays representing four types of social signal: prestige, dominance, neutral and smiling. Researchers assessed their perceptions of the targets’ dominance and prestige, alongside trait inferences about agency and communion. The study’s framework treats agency and communion as cognitive pathways theorized to underpin judgments of social rank.

The distinction between final judgments and the processing that produces them was central to the results. Testosterone had no significant main effect on the overall magnitude of explicit dominance and prestige ratings. Its detectable influence was narrower: for non-dominant signals, participants receiving testosterone showed reduced reliance on the pathway involving perceived communion, an affiliative trait.

Processing of dominance displays, which relied predominantly on agency, remained comparatively resistant to testosterone administration. The findings therefore indicate that testosterone’s measured role in social rank perception was limited and selective rather than a general upward or downward bias in status judgments. The authors characterize the effect as a subtle recalibration in the weighting of affiliative traits.

They also emphasize that the robustness of basic visual decoding means explicit verbal judgments of nonverbal displays may not be a sufficiently sensitive measure for detecting all effects of testosterone on social-cognitive processes. These results do not show that testosterone improves social judgment, changes behavior in actual social hierarchies or causes people to seek higher status. The experiment examined controlled displays in a sample restricted to healthy male participants, so its findings do not establish whether the same pattern would appear in women, other populations or real-world interactions.

Likewise, the study tested perception of dominance and prestige cues rather than whether administering testosterone alters an individual’s social position. The supported conclusion is narrower: under the study’s experimental conditions, testosterone selectively altered one component of the cognitive processing involved in interpreting non-dominant social signals without producing a broad change in explicit dominance or prestige ratings.

Subject of Research: Testosterone administration and cognitive processing of social rank cues in healthy men

Article Title: How testosterone administration affects social rank perceptions: A double-blind, placebo-controlled study

Article References: Ye, Y., Lei, X., Nan, Y., & Wu, Y. (2026). How testosterone administration affects social rank perceptions: A double-blind, placebo-controlled study. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05508-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05508-z

Keywords: testosterone, social rank, dominance perception, prestige perception, agency, communion, nonverbal cues, social cognition, double-blind study, placebo-controlled study, administration, affects