A study that will shock nobody here.

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http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0007543

Dominance, Politics, and Physiology: Voters' Testosterone Changes on the Night of the 2008 United States Presidential Election

Background
Political elections are dominance competitions. When men win a dominance competition, their testosterone levels rise or remain stable to resist a circadian decline; and when they lose, their testosterone levels fall. However, it is unknown whether this pattern of testosterone change extends beyond interpersonal competitions to the vicarious experience of winning or losing in the context of political elections. Women's testosterone responses to dominance competition outcomes are understudied, and to date, a clear pattern of testosterone changes in response to winning and losing dominance competitions has not emerged.

Methodology/Principal Findings
The present study investigated voters' testosterone responses to the outcome of the 2008 United States Presidential election. 183 participants provided multiple saliva samples before and after the winner was announced on Election Night. The results show that male Barack Obama voters (winners) had stable post-outcome testosterone levels, whereas testosterone levels dropped in male John McCain and Robert Barr voters (losers). There were no significant effects in female voters.

Conclusions/Significance
The findings indicate that male voters exhibit biological responses to the realignment of a country's dominance hierarchy as if they participated in an interpersonal dominance contest.

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Introduction

Dominance contests are a critical component of determining the leadership of social hierarchies across a wide range of species [1]–[3]. In modern human societies, this dominance contest can take the form of a democratic election. Across mammalian species, testosterone is critically linked to dominance competition for hierarchical advancement in males [3]–[5]. When males win a dominance contest, their testosterone levels rise or remain stable to resist a circadian decline, and when they lose, their testosterone levels fall [3]–[5]. In men, the described pattern of testosterone change after winning or losing has been demonstrated in the context of direct, interpersonal competition (e.g., sports matches and non-physical competitions) [4], [ e.g. 6]–[8]. In addition, Bernhardt and colleagues [9] measured World Cup soccer fans' testosterone changes after the outcome of a World Cup match, and they found that vicariously-experienced competition (i.e. watching one's favorite sports teams win or lose) drives testosterone increases in winners and decreases in losers [9]. However, this single report of the vicarious-competition effect on testosterone changes is based on a small sample, tested only men, and has never been replicated [9].

What if the vicarious dominance contest is not just a sports game as tested by Bernhardt and colleagues [9], but rather it is to select the political leader of one of the most powerful countries in the world? The extent to which the described patterns of testosterone change extend to vicarious victory and defeat in broader aspects of dominance competition like political elections is unknown. Tens of millions of United States (U.S.) citizens engage in the election both directly, by voting, and vicariously, since they do not personally win or lose. This combination of direct and vicarious involvement for voters makes democratic political elections unique dominance contests. Moreover, a party-based realignment of the U.S. political leadership of profound historical significance occurs rarely. Capitalizing on this research opportunity, the present study sought to measure voters' testosterone responses to the announcement of the outcome of the 2008 United States Presidential election.

In comparison to the numerous studies of men, far fewer studies have explored women's testosterone responses to winning and losing dominance competitions. Moreover, the existing evidence is inconsistent. While a recent study has shown that winning and losing can drive differential changes in women's testosterone levels (e.g., soccer [10]), other studies have not documented this effect (e.g. rugby [11]; soccer [12]; video game [13]; computer-based cognitive game [14] (also see Archer [4] for a meta-analysis in both sexes)). Sex differences resulting from competition outcomes extend beyond differences in testosterone levels. There are also sex differences in aggression, risk-taking, and responses to threat – all behaviors which are more prevalent in men, are generally associated with testosterone increases during young adulthood, and have been shaped in male mammals through sexual selection [15]–[17]. In addition to providing more evidence in the general study of women's testosterone changes in response to competition, the present study aimed to provide the first evidence of the effects of vicarious victory and defeat on women's changes in testosterone.

We predicted that males who voted for the losing presidential candidates would have post-outcome testosterone decreases, and that the males who voted for the winning candidate would have either stable post-outcome testosterone or testosterone increases. On the basis of inconclusive but principally null findings in past research and the evolutionary perspective which suggests that testosterone plays a lesser role in female mammalian competition, we predicted that female voters would not show differential testosterone changes according to the election outcome.

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Discussion

While past studies have shown that men's testosterone levels differentially change in response to winning or losing an interpersonal dominance contest, the present study provides novel evidence showing that vicarious victory and defeat via democratic elections has similar physiological consequences for male voters as do interpersonal dominance contests [5]. Confirming our first hypothesis, we found that men who voted for Barack Obama (winner) had stable post-outcome levels of testosterone, and men who voted for John McCain or Bob Barr (losers) had decrements in their testosterone levels. Moreover, the pattern of testosterone change remained significant even when variance in a multitude of factors was controlled for including voters' political values, support intensity for their candidates, timing of saliva collection, levels of conservatism, consumption of alcohol on the night of the election, and social surroundings on the night of the election. The robust nature of the statistical effect, even when accounting for several potential explanatory factors, strongly implicates a win/loss effect on testosterone change.

Voters experienced the outcome of winning or losing vicariously through their candidate. While voting involves direct participation in the electoral process, voters don't personally win or lose the election. In this regard, the present results are similar to the study by Bernhardt and colleagues [9] which showed that male sports fans' testosterone levels changed according to whether their team won or lost [9]. Thus, the present data offer the first empirical support of the findings of Bernhardt and colleagues [9]. The present data also extend hormonal analysis of vicarious victory and defeat to the sociopolitical domain, which had not been tested heretofore.

In past studies of competition, males' testosterone levels have risen in response to winning [4]. However, in this study, winning males' testosterone stayed constant from four hours before to after the election outcome, as opposed to rising. We argue that this is evidence of resistance to the circadian decline in men's testosterone levels, which would typically be observable over the four hour period spanning election polls closing to the collection of the last post-outcome saliva sample [22], [25]. Thus, such resistance to circadian decline over such a long period is conceptually similar to a rise in testosterone levels. Most previous non-physical competition studies have used competitions with significantly shorter durations [4], [27], [31], [33], during which testosterone levels would be much less susceptible to circadian changes. In contrast, the observed drop in the salivary testosterone levels of McCain and Barr voters was of greater magnitude than would be expected as a function of circadian decline [22], [25]. In an effort to specifically control for the effects of normal circadian decline in testosterone levels over several hour spans, future studies of this nature could also collect saliva samples from the same subjects on a control evening over the same span of time.

In confirmation of our second hypothesis, we found that female voters' testosterone levels did not change as a function of the election outcome. As measured by self-reported intensity of support for their candidate, female voters wanted their presidential candidate to win as much as male voters did, and they thought that their candidates were equally likely to win as did male voters. In addition, female voters were not different from male voters in their levels of conservatism. This evidence supports the conclusion that the observed sex difference in testosterone responses was not driven by variance in political zeal or values. In addition, the present data suggest that there is a sex difference in testosterone responses to vicariously-experienced dominance contests, which had previously been reported only in men [9]. The few studies on women's testosterone responses to winning and losing a competition have failed to present a consistent set of results [4], [10]–[14], and the present study adds evidence in support of the existing null findings. It is more difficult to measure salivary testosterone accurately in women than in men, and this could have contributed to the null finding in women [34]. Moreover, the biological mechanism that mediates males' rapid testosterone changes (via the testes) in response to winning and losing does not have a well-researched parallel mechanism in females (via the ovaries and adrenal glands) [31], [35], [36]. In combination, these factors may explain the null finding in women from both methodological and biological perspectives.

Physiological changes in voters were also accompanied by changes in affective state. Those who voted for a losing candidate felt significantly more controlled, submissive, unhappy, and unpleasant at the moment of the outcome than did those who voted for the winning candidate, which corroborates past research [31]. However, it is unclear the extent to which testosterone is directly implicated in these subjective affective states. In humans and other mammals, males' testosterone increases after winning promote willingness to compete in another dominance contest, while testosterone decreases promote withdrawing from further competition [3], [33], [37]. Since losing voters reported greater submissiveness, we speculate that losing males, who also experienced testosterone decrements, might have been less motivated to engage in dominance behavior after the election. Moreover, since the dominance hierarchy shift following a presidential election is stable for 4 years, the stress of having one's political party lose control of executive policy decisions could plausibly lead to continued testosterone suppression in males [2].

The present study focused on one aspect of cultural dominance – the re-establishment of a social hierarchy by a democratic election of a national leader. It is unknown whether shifts in international political dominance (e.g., winning or losing wars), business power (e.g., the outcome of labor union negotiations), or economic strength (e.g., events of economic boom and bust) also drive changes in citizens' physiology. As in the election, these macro-sociological events also differ from micro-sociological face-to-face dominance competitions, because the outcomes are vicariously experienced by members of the participating groups. Future research could also directly test the candidates' endocrine responses to political elections outcomes, which would be more directly analogous to social dominance contests in non-human primates.

To conclude, the present results suggest that male, but not female, voters respond with testosterone changes to the outcome of presidential elections as if they had personally fought to ascend a social dominance hierarchy. In his victory speech, Barack Obama said, “…I will never forget who this victory belongs to, it belongs to [Obama voters],” and male voters' testosterone levels reflected his sentiments regarding winning the dominance contest that is the U.S. Presidential election.