Scientists Looked at 52 Studies on Testosterone and Risk Taking and Found Almost No Connection

Scientists tested whether testosterone makes people take more risk and the result was basically zero.

Testosterone has been used to explain Wall Street bravado, reckless driving, dangerous sports, political aggression, and the familiar finding that men, on average, take more risks than women.

It is a tidy story. It is also probably wrong.

A new meta-analysis in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews finds no reliable link between testosterone and risk-taking across 52 studies involving 17,340 participants. The researchers found that people with higher testosterone were not consistently more willing to gamble, invest, or describe themselves as risk takers. Across the full dataset, the effect was essentially zero.

The finding does not mean hormones don’t influence behavior. It means testosterone does not appear to work like a universal dial for human risk. Risk-taking, the authors argue, is shaped by a harder-to-predict combination of genetics, personality, social setting, upbringing, and the emotions of the moment.

“Overall, the evidence challenges the notion that testosterone provides a general hormonal basis for human risk preferences,” the study authors concluded.

“Instead, findings support a biopsychosocial framework in which ‘risk taking’ reflects the interaction of task demands, cognitive–affective processes, and situational context, with endocrine effects appearing narrow, context-dependent, and method-specific.”

Don’t Blame it on Testosterone

Testosterone is indeed a powerful hormone. In males, it helps drive puberty, sperm production, muscle strength, bone density, and sexual desire. Females also produce testosterone, though they make up to 20 times less than men.

Because men have higher testosterone on average, and because men often score higher than women on some measures of risk-taking, researchers have long suspected that one fact explains the other.

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The authors of the new paper set out to test that idea by pooling decades of studies. They searched Google Scholar, PubMed, and Scopus for human studies linking testosterone to risk attitudes, risk seeking, or risk aversion. To qualify, a study had to measure or administer testosterone and include a behavioral or self-report measure of risk preference.

Those measures varied widely. Some studies used saliva or blood tests. Some relied on indirect body measures, such as the ratio between index and ring finger length, a controversial proxy sometimes used to estimate prenatal androgen exposure.

The risk tasks varied too. Some studies asked people to make lottery-style choices. Others used gambling games, investment tasks, or questionnaires about risky behavior. Some involved the Balloon Analogue Risk Task.  In the task, you see a virtual balloon on the screen. With each button press, you can inflate the balloon to earn more points. But if you pump it too far, it might explode, and you lose the points for that round. The trick is deciding when to stop and collect your winnings before the balloon bursts.

In total, the researchers extracted 94 effect sizes from the 52 studies.

When they pooled the evidence, the overall correlation between testosterone and risk preference was actually slightly negative, with an r value of -0.0021. In plain English: there is nothing meaningful in this potential connection.

Not All “Risk” Is the Same

Previously, some studies had reported that higher testosterone tracked with greater risk-taking. Others found no link. A few even found the opposite. The new analysis suggests that the problem may lie partly in how different researchers set about assessing risk.

Buying a volatile stock, speeding on a road, choosing an experimental medical treatment over a conventional one, popping a balloon in a lab game, and answering a personality questionnaire are all supposed to measure risk, but they’re not the same.

In the new analysis, only lottery-style economic tasks showed a small positive association with testosterone. Other measures, including self-report scales, the balloon task, and the Iowa Gambling Task (a psychological tool designed to simulate real-life decision-making by assessing an individual’s ability to balance risk, reward, and long-term consequences), did not.

But if testosterone seems connected only to one narrow kind of task, it cannot explain risk-taking as a broad human trait.

The same caution applies to hormone measurement. Studies using indirect finger-length measures were more likely to hint at a link. Studies using direct hormone assays or testosterone administration were less supportive.

The Sex Difference Question

Previous research has found average sex differences in some forms of risk-taking. These sex-based differences appear genuine. But the new meta-analysis found no evidence that testosterone explains those differences. When the authors looked at studies that reported results separately for males and females, the testosterone-risk link did not differ significantly by sex.

That does not erase sex differences in behavior, but it suggests other things may be at play.

In other words, testosterone may differ between groups without being the reason those groups behave differently in a given situation.

The authors also examined an alternative idea known as the dual-hormone hypothesis. This proposes that testosterone’s effects may depend on cortisol, the body’s main stress hormone. But the researchers found only seven suitable studies, too few and too varied to combine into a reliable meta-analysis. For now, they argue, the idea remains plausible but unproven.

A Better Question Than “Is It Testosterone?”

Hormones may still shape behavior in specific situations, especially during competition, stress, status threats, or rapid changes in hormone levels. But the evidence so far does not support the popular picture of testosterone as a master switch for risk.

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The authors point to recent large, randomized trials, published after their search cutoff, that also found little evidence that testosterone administration changed economic risk preferences or related behaviors. Those studies were not included in the main calculation, but they fit the same pattern.

For instance, in a large preregistered, double-blind trial, 1,000 men received either intranasal testosterone or placebo and then faced economic tasks testing risk, social preferences, and competitiveness. The testosterone group behaved no differently on the study’s nine main outcomes.

In a smaller trial of healthy young men under severe diet-and-exercise stress, weekly testosterone injections raised hormone exposure but did not reliably change risk-taking, aggression, competition, mood, or cognitive performance.

Risk-taking can look bold from the outside. Inside the brain and body, it may depend on what is at stake, who is watching, how the choice is framed, how stress feels in the moment, and whether the reward seems worth the possible loss.

Testosterone may be part of some of those stories. This study suggests it is not the whole plot.