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Public release date: 10 October 2007
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Lower testosterone levels in married men
A fascinating new study is the first outside of North America to observe lower testosterone levels among married men.
Supporting a growing body of research, the study reveals that even married men who are considered aloof spouses and
provide minimal parenting have much lower testosterone levels than single, unmarried men.
In the October issue of Current Anthropology, Peter B. Gray (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), Peter T. Ellison
(Harvard University), and Benjamin C. Campbell (Boston University) investigated the links between male testosterone
levels and marital status among modern-day pastoralists in northern Kenya - of whom less than 1.5 percent consider
their wives a source of emotional support. The Ariaal males serve as herd boys until they reach puberty, at which
point they are initiated, become warriors, and accumulate livestock. They do not marry and have children until
around 30, and, the researchers suggest, value social bonds with male peers more than spousal bonds or familial bonds.
"These findings add to the cross-cultural scope of published data on the topic of human pair bonding, parenting and
testosterone," explain the researchers. "While a number of North American studies have shown lower testosterone
levels among monogamously married men compared with their single counterparts, no study outside North America had
observed this."
The researchers measured testosterone in morning and afternoon saliva samples of more than 200 Ariaal men over the
age of twenty. They found that monogamously married men had lower testosterone levels than unmarried men in both
the morning and afternoon. However, contrary to expectations, married men with more than one wife (polygynously married
men) had even lower levels of testosterone that the monogamously married men.
"These results lend further support to arguments that male testosterone levels reflect, in part, variation in male
mating effort," the researchers write. "[However], contrary to earlier findings . . . polygynously married men did
not show higher testosterone levels. In fact, follow-up analyses among Ariaal men aged 40 and older revealed lower
testosterone levels among polygynously married men compared with monogamously married men."
The researchers suggest that this may be due to the fact that it is older men - who typically have lower testosterone
levels - who have the social status and wealth required to obtain more than one wife.
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/
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