@mekkaokereke Reminds me of a study I read about many years ago where participants had to play a typical psychology-study game where had to make a choice to be more fair or more selfish. Control group got placebo. The three experimental groups got:

* placebo, but told it was testosterone
* testosterone, but not told what it was
* testosterone, and told it was testosterone

@mw @mekkaokereke "Researchers at the University of Zurich and Royal Holloway, University of London conducted a study of 120 women and found that testosterone promoted fairness in a bargaining game."

120 is interesting, not proof. :)

@CStamp @mekkaokereke Yeah, statistically not huge, and psychology-study games don't always translate well to the real world. But there are lots of other related studies if you really want to dig into it. This is just the one I remember hearing about :-).

For me, the big thing isn't so much the hormone effect, but the effect of people's _ideas_ of the hormones, which in this case were opposite to the actual ones.

@mw @CStamp @mekkaokereke The same thing has been shown to happen with alcohol. As much as 50% of "drunk behavior" happens when you give people quinine and tell them it's vodka. This effect has been shown to be true across cultures, where different cultures have different ideas about what "drunk behavior" is. People act more like a stereotypical drunk for their culture, specifically.

In America, people talk about alcohol reducing inhibitions, but most of the inhibition reduction, specifically, happens when people just think they have alcohol. The alcohol just gives them permission to drop their inhibitions.

This does not mean that alcohol doesn't impact the mind. It does. It just doesn't as much as people think it does, or necessarily in the ways that people think it does, but people behave as if it did.