Is testosterone responsible for typically "male" behaviour?

Question

On the English Language and Usage stack exchange, two people asked what was meant by "testosterone-charged", as in the following quote, from the story "2 States: The Story of My Marriage" by Chetan Bhagat:

"I’d have much preferred her place, as I didn’t want her to be the only woman in the dorm with twenty testosterone-charged men"

A number of English language dictionaries describe testosterone as a figurative way to refer to manly behaviour. For example, the English edition of Wiktionary has

2 (figuratively) Manly behavior, often of an aggressive or foolishly reckless nature. Mother encouraged James to rely more on intelligence and less on testosterone to deal with the neighbor's son.

While vocabulary.com has in the second paragraph

The word testosterone was coined in the 1930s. It is based on the Latin word testis, which means testicle, and the word sterol, meaning steroid. Because it is the hormone that develops male characteristics, the word testosterone sometimes refers to the quality of being male. A room crowded with men watching football is commonly described as being "full of testosterone."

and Merriam Webster has

2: qualities (as brawn and aggressiveness) usually associated with males : manliness

These sources may or may not be notable in themselves, but they do attest to a widespread perception by the general public about what testosterone is and what it does.

Question is, is this perception valid? I'd like to know, so that if I had to describe the metaphorical sense of "testosterone", I'd be able to tell them right off the bat whether it was true or not, rather than polluting the world with more misinformation.

I'm wondering because many ideas that become popular in the general public are either incorrect, or have been over-simplified somewhat, whereas ideas that are complicated and nuanced aren't as popular in the general public.

Wikipedia's article on testosterone is very long, but most of it is about mundane details such as its effects on anatomy (in both a euphemistic and non-euphemistic sense). The section Romantic relationships and fatherhood onwards until the end of Aggression and criminality addresses the effects of testosterone on behaviour, but some of it is less than convincing. Sometimes it talks about correlation, and Wikipedia doesn't seem to mention a mechanism by which testosterone causes "male" behaviour.

Does testosterone play a role in stereotypical "male" behaviour, such as a high desire for sex, and a propensity for competitive, aggressive or high risk behaviour?

Answer 1

Human behavior is complicated. Here's for example a study titled "Male Testosterone Linked to High Social Dominance but Low Physical Aggression in Early Adolescence" that investigates boys aged 6-12:

Boys perceived as socially dominant by unfamiliar peers were found to have concurrently higher levels of testosterone than boys perceived as less socially dominant. In contrast, boys who had a history of high physical aggression, from age 6 to 12, were found to have lower testosterone levels at age 13 compared with boys with no history of high physical aggression. The former were also failing in school and were unpopular with their peers.

The claim that testosterone always produces aggression is therefore false. On the other hand, you could label socially dominant behavior as "manly". The kid who's socially dominant and is popular with his peers doesn't need to engage in aggression.

Mazur, Allan, and Alan Booth. "Testosterone and dominance in men." Behavioral and Brain Science (1998) says:

In men, high levels of endogenous testosterone (T) seem to encourage behavior intended to dominate – to enhance one’s status over – other people. Sometimes dominant behavior is aggressive, its apparent intent being to inflict harm on another person, but often dominance is expressed nonaggressively. Sometimes dominant behavior takes the form of antisocial behavior, including rebellion against authority and law breaking. Measurement of T at a single point in time, presumably indicative of a man’s basal T level, predicts many of these dominant or antisocial behaviors.

It's also worth noting that testosterone not only causes dominace but also the other way around (from the same study):

The act of competing for dominant status affects male T levels in two ways. First, T rises in the face of a challenge, as if it were an anticipatory response to impending competition. Second, after the competition, T rises in winners and declines in losers.

The person who wins the challenge for social dominance is more likely to engage in more challenges for social domiance through his raised testosterone. The loser of the conflict reduces his testosterone and therefore is less likely to try to be socially dominant again and fail again.

I'd like to know, so that if I had to describe the metaphorical sense of "testosterone", I'd be able to tell them right off the bat whether it was true or not

Asking whether a psychological model like this is true or false is a bad question. If you want to evaluate such a model you have to ask yourself whether the model is able to make useful predictions.

An example of a very bad psychology model would be the model that astrology proposes. You have 12 different personality traits that all depend on when the person got born. If you use that model and observe people's behavior you can't predict at all when they got born.

In physics Newton created a quite useful model for the way gravity works. Newton's model makes useful predictions. You can use it to effective calculate the aerodynamics of airplane travel.

Words like dominance and aggression are theoretical constructs that humans invented to describe reality. If you ask two different observers whether a behavior is dominant, they are more likely than chance to agree. There are however also cases where the two observers will disagree. You can't measure the quantity of dominance as finely as you can measure the speed of an object. As a result a concept that uses terms like domiance is unable to make predictions with 99.9% certainty.

If you have two people and judge their dominance you can't predict their testosterone levels with 99.9% certainty.

But let's get back to the definition of male behavior:

Most males have a higher testosterone level than females. Testosterone does have an effect on behavior. If one wants to avoid vague human created terms like 'domiance' and 'aggression', it's tempting to define male behavior as that behavior that's created by a higher testosterone level.

Since testosterone levels are in principle less fuzzy than old psychological terms like 'dominance' there some idealistic hope that it's a better definition. Giving the complexity of human behavior it's however hard to invent good categories and some people might find it more useful to use words like 'dominance' and 'aggression' because they can better imagine what those words mean.