21/02/19
Speaker: Carsten de Dreu, Professor of Social and Organisational Psychology at Leiden University
Competitive interactions, including those between terrorists and police officers and schoolyard bullies and their victims, often take the form of attacker-defender contests. In theory, attackers should mismatch while defenders should match their antagonist’s toughness. Whether and why humans (fail to) implement such mismatching-matching strategies is unknown and examined here. Fifty males provided saliva before and after making 60 investments as either attacker or defender in an incentivized economic contest with antagonists that played tough or soft strategies. Results show (i) attackers fail to mismatch their defender’s strategy, whereas defenders adequately matched their attacker’s toughness; (ii) baseline testosterone inhibits mismatching during attack but not matching during defense; (iii) increases in testosterone and matching rather than mismatching associated with more attacker victories but lower attacker earnings; and (iv) cortisol was unrelated to contest behavior and outcomes. Thus, mismatching one’s antagonist’s toughness is difficult and the required flexibility is inhibited by testosterone.