Masculinity and Lying

Dishonesty in communication has important economic implications. The standing literature has shown that lying is less pervasive than predicted by standard economic theory. We explore whether biology can help to explain this behavior. In a sample of men, we study whether masculine traits are related to (dis)honesty in a sender-receiver game. We study three masculine physical traits: the second-to-fourth digit ratio, facial morphometric masculinity and the facial width-to-height ratio. These biomarkers display significant associations with lying and deception in the game. We also explore the extent to which these effects operate through social preferences or through beliefs about the behavior of receivers.

Sex Affects the Relationship Between Third Party Punishment and Cooperation

Prosocial third-party punishment (3PP) is a punitive behavior against antisocial individuals, which might explain extended cooperativeness in humans. 3PP shows sexual dimorphism, being more frequent in men than in women. We studied whether sexually dimorphic features related to sexual hormones during development (facial dimorphism and 2D:4D) influence the tendency to engage in 3PP in a sample of 511 women and 328 men. After playing a Prisoner's Dilemma, participants had to decide whether to penalize the defection of a third player who had exploited his/her counterpart's cooperation. In line with previous studies, we observe that men are more prone to engage in 3PP than women. We find that this sex difference is due to cooperative men being more likely to punish than cooperative women. In addition, men with higher facial masculinity are less likely to engage in 3PP, whereas no features influence 3PP in women. We discuss the possibility that sex differences in the motivations and fitness implications underlying 3PP might be driving the observed results.

Facial masculinity: how the choice of measurement method enables to detect its influence on behaviour

Recent research has explored the relationship between facial masculinity, human male behaviour and males' perceived features (i.e. attractiveness). The methods of measurement of facial masculinity employed in the literature are quite diverse. In the present paper, we use several methods of measuring facial masculinity to study the effect of this feature on risk attitudes and trustworthiness. We employ two strategic interactions to measure these two traits, a first-price auction and a trust game. We find that facial width-to-height ratio is the best predictor of trustworthiness, and that measures of masculinity which use Geometric Morphometrics are the best suited to link masculinity and bidding behaviour. However, we observe that the link between masculinity and bidding in the first-price auction might be driven by competitiveness and not by risk aversion only. Finally, we test the relationship between facial measures of masculinity and perceived masculinity. As a conclusion, we suggest that researchers in the field should measure masculinity using one of these methods in order to obtain comparable results. We also encourage researchers to revise the existing literature on this topic following these measurement methods.