Study links testosterone to short-term money gains
But what seems to start out well can turn bad, with elevated testosterone
levels over several days possibly leading to irrational risk-taking, according
to researchers at the University of Cambridge in England.
"If people want to get practical, it would be good for both banks and the
financial system as a whole if we had more women and older men in the
markets," said John M. Coates, lead author of a study appearing in this
week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Such a change would produce a much more stable financial system, said Coates, a
research fellow in the university's department of physiology, development and
neuroscience.
Coates and Joe Herbert studied male financial traders in London, taking saliva
samples in the morning and evening. They found that levels of two hormones,
testosterone and cortisol, affected traders.
Those with higher levels of testosterone in the morning were more likely to
make an unusually big profit that day, the researchers found.
Testosterone, best known as the male sex hormone, affects aggression,
confidence and risk-taking.
Cortisol is tied to uncertainty, novelty and unpredictability, "which
pretty much describes a trader's life," Coates said in a telephone
interview.
Coates and Herbert's study comes less than two weeks after U.S. researchers
reported that young men shown erotic pictures were more likely to make a larger
financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such as
a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler.
Money and women trigger the same brain area in men, those researchers said.
Camelia Kuhnen, an assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Finance at
Northwestern University, said Coates and Herbert's findings "are very
interesting, and they help support the claim that emotion influences financial
decisions." But she cautioned that the findings don't prove a causal link
between testosterone and profitability. Kuhnen, who was not part of Coates and
Herbert's team, termed the idea that long-term high testosterone levels can
lead to irrational risk-taking an "interesting hypothesis."
The London study indicated hormone levels in the traders were both responding
to financial events and influencing them.
Their conclusion: "Cortisol is likely, therefore, to rise in a market
crash and, by increasing risk aversion, to exaggerate the market's downward
movement. Testosterone, on the other hand, is likely to rise in a bubble and,
by increasing risk- taking, to exaggerate the market's upward movement."
And that, Coates and Herbert wrote, "may help explain why people caught in
bubbles and crashes often find it difficult to make rational choices."
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