The study linked in the article only has the abstract available but it does suggest that "testosterone induces a 'red shift' among weakly-affiliated Democrats". I can't see any of the methodolgy, but even if we go ahead and say that this outdated 2011 study is fine, what conclusions can we draw?
First thing is that it only found these associations with "weakly aligned" democrats, which is already a pretty narrow slice of the population. It doesn't surprise me that an idiot on the fence would be swayed by emotion.
Secondly, it seems to suggest to me that conservatives successfully brand themselves as "masculine". So a wishy-washy "weakly aligned" democrat who begins feeling more aggressive would probably resonate more with the party of base aggression and masculine posturing, who founds clickbait news sources with fracking billionaire money to tell rural Americans that drinking too much soy makes you gay and that ruins the country. Yeah, sounds pretty conservative to me.
I wouldn't make much of this article. If believing in equal rights makes me a soyboy then whip out the cock and I'll suck it til justice day.
Nice strawman but the article has nothing to do with equal rights.
The conclusion we can find is declining testosterone levels should be further studied since liberal men tend to be less intelligent, more mentally ill, and less masculine than conservative men. All of these are linked to testosterone.
Nice strawman but the article has nothing to do with equal rights.
It absolutely does. Look up "Roe V Wade" since you've apparently never heard of it
liberal men tend to be less intelligent,
Gonna need a citation on that cuz there's plenty of evidence that higher education is correlated with left-leaning views. Or are you about to try to discredit higher education itself? Sounds like something someone really, really smart would do....
Carl (2014) analysed data from the U.S. General Social Survey (GSS), and found that individuals who identify as Republican have slightly higher verbal intelligence than those who identify as Democrat
That's a bold bold statement. I would love to see how you back that up.
To add, Testosterone is not necessarily a miracle hormone with no side affects
It is very well known that higher test can result in aggressive tendencies... Not to mention the physical health risks.
Here's literally the first study I found online which shows and increasing Test in males can lead to physical and emotional child abuse.
From OP's study:
No effects were found of testosterone
administration for strongly affiliated Democrats or strong or weak Republicans. Our findings
provide evidence that neuroactive hormones affect political preferences.
This obviously shows that Test was enough of an emotional push to get weekly affiliated Dems to switch. It likely has nothing to do with increased cognitive abilities.
I could copy the entire thing, but here's an except.
"Our key finding, that T influenced political preferences for weakly affiliated
Democrats, contributes to the analysis of political adverting and persuasion. Our previous
research using synthetic oxytocin administration to influence political preferences showed that
changes only occurred for weakly affiliated Democrats (Merolla et al., 2013). Extending our
previous finding, the analysis here showed that weakly affiliated Democrats were persuadable
physiologically while strong Democrats and all Republicans were not."
I'm not a scientist, far from it, but it seems pretty straight forward to me. Weakly affiliated dems became more conservative with more T.
Probably low. They have been declining since we started to track them. We already know liberals are less masculine and more likely to be mentally ill. That has been discussed for years.
The link in the article goes directly to the data used in the study, for some reason. My link is the paper the article is about. CTRL + F the quote paragraph by Throwaway if you don't believe me. It clearly talks about testosterone.