When Zach Hertz of the Philadelphia Eagles caught the first touchdown that led to this season’s shutout against the Giants, both his arms shot skywards in a wide V. To Assistant Professor of Psychology Coren Apicella, this display signals something more than a moment of celebration. Apicella, who is exploring the reciprocal relationship between competition and hormones, also wants to understand how the outcome of the game might change if instead he slumped his shoulders and hung his head.
Apicella’s work expands on recent psychological studies which correlate winning with boosts in testosterone. “There's a pretty robust finding in the literature that men who win competitions experience a relative increase in testosterone compared to men who lose,” says Apicella. She coupled these findings with recent work on posture analysis by Amy Cuddy at Harvard University. Posture has an important influence on your mood. Assume a power pose like a super hero—straight-backed, hands on your hips—and, Cuddy’s research team has shown, you boost your confidence.
Apicella designed an experiment to test testosterone levels of men engaged in a competition to determine if the posture they assume afterwards will increase or decrease the concentration of testosterone in their saliva. Her study is examining the impact of these power positions from a variety of angles. Is it only the outcome of the game that is important or does how you win or lose also matter? “What happens if you take a power pose that is incongruent with what actually happened in the game?” she asks. “Can you affect how you respond to the game? For instance, if you take a high-power pose after losing a game can you stop testosterone from declining?”
While Apicella works in the psychology department, her interests and methods combine perspectives from other fields including economics and anthropology. As a master’s degree student in evolutionary psychology at the University of Liverpool, she wondered whether the common experimental practice of using college students as study subjects was producing a skewed understanding of human psychology. Concerned that she and her peers were making broad claims about human nature based on a narrow population, she sought to find a population that could more adequately exemplify our evolutionary past.
A decade ago she ventured into Tanzania accompanied by her research advisor to study one of the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies. Her work with the Hadza answered how humans build community and work as a unit for survival. Today she continues to visit the Hadza on a regular basis. Recently, she examined sex differences in willingness to compete in the Hadza and found that, for most tasks, women prefer to be paid according to their own individual performance while men prefer to be paid according to their relative performance. Apicella believes the Hadza may help to explain why women are underrepresented in top positions in major industries around the world.
Apicella hopes that her current experiments on posture and competition will lead to a better understanding of the relationship between testosterone and competitiveness and risk-taking. Combined with findings from her work with the Hadza, she may be able to better understand problems such as why there are fewer female CEOs. But Apicella’s interests don’t stop there. “My overarching question is: What are the traits that make us unique, that set us apart from other animals? And what are the things that really unify humans as a species around the world?”
