Republican Men, Gird Yer Loins
January 13, 2010 / 10:58 am • By Dr. Melissa Clouthier
A woman’s hormonal cycle will start to mesh with other women when in proximity. A man’s hormones also seemed to be linked to other men. Via Allahpundit on Twitter comes this research gem from Scientific American:
With its winners and losers, politics is a lot like sports. Now biologists have the testosterone—or lack thereof—to prove it. Specifically, they have found that male voters who back a losing candidate experience a drop in the hormone.
Immediately before and after the 2008 U.S. presidential election result, neuroscientists from Duke University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor collected the saliva of 163 college-age participants to determine the amount of testosterone in their systems. Male voters for winner Barack Obama had stable levels of testosterone, but the hormone rapidly declined in males who cast ballots for losers John McCain and Robert Barr. Female voters showed no significant testosterone changes after victory or defeat of their candidate.
Past research has shown that winning and losing in sports matches and other competitions affect testosterone levels in men. The new findings, published online October 21 by PLoS ONE, reveal that politics can influence testosterone in men “just as if they directly engaged head to head in a contest for dominance,” says Kevin LaBar of Duke, the study’s senior researcher.
So the solution, then, is to have winning GOP candidates. I expect Republican men to experience a testosterone surge in the coming year. Something to look forward to.
