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Hormones and Competitive Behavior
Sýkora, Zdeněk ; Cingl, Lubomír (advisor) ; Bauer, Michal (referee)
The thesis aims to contribute to the literature on the biological underpinnings of important economic behaviors. Financial markets can become dangerously unstable from many reasons such as the hormones contained in our bodies. We primarily focus on the effect of basal testosterone and cortisol on willingness to compete and risk taking. We also investigate their interaction called the dual-hormone hypothesis, because it has not been sufficiently analyzed and replicated so far. We run a controlled laboratory experiment with 96 university students and have gender-balanced dataset, thus we can also examine gender differences. We find no support that higher testosterone increase willingness to compete in men as opposed to most of the recent literature. Moreover, higher levels of testosterone decrease competitiveness but only for women. We further find positive effect of the 2D:4D ratio for women and negative effect of trait anxiety for men on competitiveness. There are also substantial gender differences in competitive and risk taking behavior. We cannot confirm the dual-hormone hypothesis for willingness to compete. But we find significant support for the dual-hormone hypothesis for risk taking for women and with negative effect of testosterone on risk taking. The effects stay robust even after...
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The ratio of second to fourth digit length and sport performance in recreational and top snowboarders
Švehla, Jakub ; Pivoňková, Věra (advisor) ; Lindová, Jitka (referee)
The second (index finger) to fourth (ring finger) digit length ratio (2D:4D) is known to be a putative marker of prenatal exposure to the testosterone. It has been reported that fetal testosterone may be critical for development of morphological and psychological traits such as quality of the cardiovascular system, visuo-spatial ability, risk-taking behavior and behavioral masculinity. Testosterone-driven attributes are associated with success in male-to- male physical competition, which may be proxied by ability in sports. Many studies have found that 2D:4D is sexually dimorphic and low (male-typical) 2D:4D ratio is associated with athletic performance. This study aims to investigate possible associations of performance in sport with 2D:4D ratio, personality characteristics (Big Five model), willing to take risks and training habits, in a sample of 57 top and 57 recreational snowboard racers. We did not find any associations between 2D:4D ratio and sport performance, no significant differences were found in 2D:4D ratio between samples. We found negative associations between agreeableness and sport performance; individuals with low agreeableness achieved higher results in the real competition of freestyle snowboarding. Low agreeableness used to be associated with aggressiveness, emulation and...
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