We’ve known it for ages, but science has finally quantified the effect for our non-gamer parents, peers and perhaps girlfriends (we’re not Slashdot, though much love to them) to understand: gamers receive surges of testosterone-fueled aggression from victory in games.

However, the second point they posit is somewhat slightly lesser known, but it’s reassuring all the same.

So it’s fairly obvious that whenever you kick someone’s ass in a game you’re fueled with feelings of awesome and win, but that’s supposing that the person’s ass you kick is a STRANGER. Kicking the ass of a person you know well, a person you’ve practiced with, results in much less testosterone-fueled aggression.

The study the article focuses on sees a group of university-aged males organized into four teams and given some monetary incentive to win: $45 for victory and only $15 for defeat. No one in the teams knew each other prior to the study, but when the teams were formed, they practiced together as teams extensively. When playing each other in Team Deathmatches, their testosterone levels reacted in much the way you’d expect: victorious teams got a rush of it after winning, while losers’ levels fell but soon rebounded afterwards.

Now was the second part of the study: plain deathmatch between members of the same team. The same monetary incentive was in place: $45 for victory and $15 for defeat for every member of the team. Despite this incentive though, it was found that the players ranking highest in matches had universally lower testosterone levels than those who lost.

Obviously this is just an article to be shown to people that don’t get your reactions during games (the groups already mentioned at the beginning of this writing), but also recognize these effects in a couple of other situations. Psychopaths who get the rush regardless of friend or stranger– or is everyone just a stranger to them? Traitors– exploiting the lack of testosterone-fueled aggression to get the advantage?

See the original article here.