Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (36 page)

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Authors: James McBride Dabbs,Mary Godwin Dabbs

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BOOK: Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior
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victed of manslaughter. He later went back to prison for a parole violation. While there, he got an additional eight years for assaulting a guard. He was in solitary confinement at the Maryland State Penitentiary reading a play,
Day of Absence
, when he decided to turn his life around. The play affected him so profoundly that he had an epiphany; he knew that he had been born to be an actor. After almost eight years in prison, he went back to school, worked in local theater for two years, applied to the Yale Drama School, became one of sixteen out of seven hundred applicants accepted, and went from Yale to Broadway.
26
Frank Rich, a
New York Times
theater critic, reviewed Dutton's performance in
The Piano Lesson
, and said, "He's a force of nature on stage, a human cyclone."
It is clear there is a relationship between high testosterone and acting, which leads to questions about other people in the entertainment industry, including those who work behind the scenes. When the moviemakers mentioned in Chapter 3 were filming at my brother's farm, I sent Jasmin Riad and Rebecca Strong in a rented LeBaron convertible to visit the film crew in South Carolina and collect saliva samples from them. We wanted to find out if they, like actors, had high testosterone levels. Before we went, my son, James, suggested that I talk with his friend, Rick Nelson, who is a gaffer, an electrical and lighting technician.
Nelson explained to me how film crews, like the one we would be studying, functioned. Crew members are freelancers employed by a production company incorporated to put together one movie. The production company works under contract with a large corporation like Disney or Tri-Star. When the movie is completed, the production company dissolves itself, and the members of the crew are unemployed until they sign on with a new company for a new project. People who work on film crews move around the country from one job to another, living in motels and associating with other crew members, some of whom they will know only for the duration of the project. These freelance moviemakers, like actors, have little job security in a highly competitive field, and as the saying goes, "they are only as good as their last job." Producers and directors work under time and money pressure, knowing that factors beyond their control, such as bad weather, can put them behind schedule and over budget. Crew members are aware of
 
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their responsibility not to waste time or money. In addition to that, their work often involves long hours, heavy lifting, and physical discomfort. We predicted that the energy and single-minded focus that goes along with high testosterone would often be an asset to filmmakers. Our study provided mild support for our prediction.
When we visited the set, the filming was almost complete and everyone was tired. That was particularly true about my brother and sister-in-law. They were exasperated with people treating their home "like a movie set" and tired of Hollywood egos and Hollywood hype. Dick will have stories to tell his friends and relatives for a long time. He told us one about the first assistant director, who'd been directing an outdoor scene. Dick said, "There was a faint, high-pitched, mechanical sound in the background that was bothering her. She sent one of her people to find out what it was. I told him, and he told her, 'Dick Dabbs says it's a cotton picker, about two miles away.' She told him, 'Well, shut it off.'"
Although Dick found the director exasperating, she was well liked by the film crew, and Jasmin and Rebecca defended her. They were impressed with her confidence and lack of self-consciousness. She was like the trial lawyers when it came to spitting in public. Jasmin met her outside her trailer and gave her a vial. She took the vial and walked into the catering tent, where she sat, spitting into it and talking with crew members who were eating breakfast. One crew member looked aghast while watching her spit at the breakfast table, and Jasmin got the vial out of sight as soon as possible, but the assistant director was completely unperturbed.
We distributed peer-rating questionnaires to crew members, because we wanted to compare certain personality characteristics to the testosterone scores. The questionnaires were helpful, but Jasmin, Rebecca, Dick, and my cousins were more helpful. Dick spent a great deal of time with the crew, and he described some of the people before we took our saliva samples and some afterward. The people who impressed Dick as being most outrageous turned out be among those highest in testosterone. Although our individual test results were confidential, as they had been with the construction workers, a few minutes after the film crew got their scores, everybody seemed to know the results of everyone else's test. With the exception of one woman who scored high, people of both sexes were happy if they scored high and
 
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unhappy if they scored low. Mary took that as evidence that male values dominate our culture and make both men and women overvalue testosterone. I agreed with her, particularly when we heard that one man had been planning to call his wife and tell her his score, but because it turned out to be lower than the group average, decided not to call her. The fact that he had looked forward to telling his wife about his score meant to me that he had a good relationship with her, and that his testosterone level was just about right. Dick, who was not generous with praise for the movie people, said that man was good at his job and also pleasant and reasonable in his dealings with others. Dick said, "The difference I saw between the high group and the others is that the people in the high group seemed to be trying to prove something, and some of the men who weren't so high seemed to be more secure in their masculinity."
Observations about the differences between the high group and the others, along with data from our saliva samples, made the study a successful one. The samples were informative, even though we collected them on the morning after a party near the end of the shoot. Many of the crew members were tired, hungover, or a little worried about finding a new job, and there were too few people in our experiment to make adjustments allowing for differences in age. All of these factors would tend to bring the group average down, but nevertheless, the sample average was a little high compared to the general population. Interestingly, two men over fifty had very high scores and one older woman had a high score, which made us wonder how much higher they must have been when they were younger.
All the Jobs in the Country
The lawyers, actors, ministers, production crew members, and others we studied represented only a few occupations, but I found scores for a wider range of jobs in the records of the 4,462 military veterans described in Chapter 4. The average age of the veterans was thirty-eight years, and they were like much of the rest of the United States population in age, race, and income. Information available on each man included his testosterone score and his civilian occupation.
The men represented more than five hundred occupations, ranging
 
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from bridge welder to state legislator. I examined the testosterone level for each occupation and came up with a number of findings that were quite interesting. For example, heavy truck drivers were 25 percent higher in testosterone than light truck drivers, advertising managers 46 percent higher than computer programmers, automotive salesmen 24 percent higher than high school teachers, financial managers 24 percent higher than other financial officers, butchers 29 percent higher than draftsmen, and construction laborers 24 percent higher than a combined group of trial and nontrial lawyers. There is also some data comparing the testosterone levels of women in various occupations. One researcher has found women lawyers as a group (both trial and nontrial) to be higher in testosterone than women athletes, nurses, or teachers.
27
Using the veterans data, many of the apparent differences among occupations, because they involve small samples, will not be statistically significant. To minimize the element of chance, we grouped similar occupations together following a system used by the U.S. Census Bureau. We divided the occupations into seven groups: managerial and professional; technical, clerical, and sales; service; precision production and repair; laborer and operator; farmer; and unemployed.
Figure 6.2 shows the average testosterone levels for the seven groups, again with error bars at the top. Farmers were lowest, followed by white-collar workers, including managerial and professional, technical, clerical, and sales categories. Next came blue-collar workers, including workers in production and labor. Finally, highest of all, were unemployed men. Unemployed men may be depressed, impotent, and low in testosterone because they have been laid off, as described in Chapter 4. However, many of the unemployed veterans were only temporarily without work, and I think many of them were not simply "unemployed," but unable or unwilling to stay at the same job for very long.
Overall, blue-collar workers were about 8 percent higher in testosterone than white-collar workers. Blue-collar workers also had fewer years of education, and their records showed more delinquent behavior and trouble with the law. Mike Roseberry, the construction superintendent mentioned in previous chapters, said this sounded right to him. Like Mike, who'd been willing to start a fight for research purposes, con-
 
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Figure 6.2
Testosterone levels among men in occupations defined by U.S. census
categories. Testosterone was measured from serum, and the scale is the same
as that in Figure 6.1.
struction workers take the direct approach to problem solving, and if the direct approach leads to a fight, they sometimes get into trouble. They like action and are interested in doing things, not thinking about them. In
Newsweek
, a "blue-collar guy" wrote about the energy of construction workers.
28
He said,
 . . . they are always doing things that end up in the letter "n"you knowhuntin', fishin', workin' . . . I have honest to God heard these things on Monday mornings about blue collar guy weekends: "I tore out a wall and added a room," "I built a garage," "I went walleye fishing Saturday and pheasant hunting Sunday,'' "I played touch football both days" (in January), "I went skydiving," "I went to the sports show and wrestled the bear."
Farmers are a special group, neither blue collar nor white collar. They are both managers and workers. Unlike other people, most farm-

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