"testosterone increases positive attitudes toward positional goods when they are described as status-enhancing, but not when they are described as power-enhancing or high in quality"

You hear that Louis Vuiton?

The Froomester showed that inhaling Salbutamol wins you the Vuelta. After three weeks of steep climbs on a road cycle in sweltering heat. Good to know you can gain status easier.

Single-dose testosterone administration increases men’s preference for status goods

Abstract

In modern human cultures where social hierarchies are ubiquitous, people typically signal their hierarchical position through consumption of positional goods—goods that convey one’s social position, such as luxury products. Building on animal research and early correlational human studies linking the sex steroid hormone testosterone with hierarchical social interactions, we investigate the influence of testosterone on men’s preferences for positional goods. Using a placebo-controlled experiment (N = 243) to measure individuals’ desire for status brands and products, we find that administering testosterone increases men’s preference for status brands, compared to brands of similar perceived quality but lower perceived status. Furthermore, testosterone increases positive attitudes toward positional goods when they are described as status-enhancing, but not when they are described as power-enhancing or high in quality. Our results provide novel causal evidence for the biological roots of men’s preferences for status, bridging decades of animal behavioral studies with contemporary consumer research.

Reasons are manifold. Like shagging.

At the individual level, higher social rank improves mating opportunities, promotes access to resources, reduces stress, and increases social influence. Therefore, individuals exert considerable effort to enhance their social rank by gaining status (i.e., respect and admiration from others, sometimes also referred to as prestige) and power (i.e., control over valuable resources, sometimes also referred to as dominance).

There is also the risk of outspending yourself and you might end up looking like an idiot.

Understanding the drivers of costly signaling through positional consumption is important because this behavior is, by definition, wasteful—in the sense that less expensive goods could have the same functional value as their high-status counterparts (e.g., cars and houses). Status consumption therefore creates inefficiencies. Spending resources to elevate perceived status might, for instance, perpetuate poverty by reducing self-investment in health and education among the poor, who spend disproportionately more on status signals and thus substitute status signaled through consumption for long-run wealth accumulation.

Then again, you might be an idiot but a fit one.

The handicap principle explains these adaptations as costly signals of male fitness: because only the fittest can afford to waste resources on traits that do not directly increase survival probability, these adaptations become reliable indicators of fitness.

Speaking of fit idiots, you want of course Calvin Klein's crap.

Testosterone’s effect on brand preference

Participants viewed five pairs of pretested apparel brands in a randomized, counterbalanced order. One brand of each pair was associated with higher social rank than the other (e.g., Calvin Klein, high vs. Levi’s, low). Importantly, perceived social rank difference between the brands in each pair was substantially greater than perceived difference in quality, mitigating the possibility that the latter influenced participants’ preferences in our task (see Fig. 2b and Supplementary Table 5). Participants indicated the extent to which they preferred one brand relative to the other using 10-point rating scales (Fig. 2a).

More testosterone-laden stuff here.