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Is personality associated with a person’s hormones (i.e., cortisol(C), testosterone(T))? Do neurotic people have higher C? Do extraverts have higher T? In a registered report (N=3,964), we saw the answers to these questions were mostly, “no.” 1/8 https://psyarxiv.com/xfcjv/
A lot of early and current theories of personality are rooted in our biology, whether it be older ideas like different fluids in your body (i.e., Hippocrates/Gall) or more standard thinking about how hormones are chemical messengers that somehow end up affecting behavior. 2/8
But it didn’t really shake out that way—when you correlate personality, testosterone, and cortisol, effects are really small. In fact, only one effect was large enough to even talk about: people with higher levels of testosterone reported lower conscientiousness (r = -.05). 3/8
Effects were rarely there—for women, for men, for those using hormonal contraceptives and not, corrected for measurement error and not, standardized within or across gender, in interaction with another hormone, in one big analysis or a (fixed/random-effects) meta-analysis. 4/8
I feel like Sam-I-Am listing all the ways I don’t like Green Eggs/Ham or how rare personality/hormones were related. Measures of heterogeneity didn’t suggest much there there, “not in a house, not in a box, not with a mouse, not with a fox.” (future mouse/fox research needed) 5/8
Lots of limitations—we didn’t look at hormonal (situational) reactivity, various age groups, non-self-report measures of personality (or even behavior), different assay procedures. In reality, it’s a relatively narrow question and not the final word on these effects. 6/8
They could very well be related—but maybe not robustly so with this approach. It’s a start—describing how persy and hormones are(n’t) related is important. Helps build theory and guide research on how biological systems are reflected in persy and how we behave every day. 7/8
This thread was just *my* reflections! Thx to all those involved: @SirElkhair, @prasad_smrithi, @pranjmehta, @esraascigil, @cmbrandes, @chinkristi, @tkordsmeyer, @_julia_stern, @LarsPenke, @EdelsteinLab, @ZA_Reese, @jmcarre14, @RelationScience, @TheRisingSundin, @JnfrLTackett 8/8
