Introduction
social behaviors, dominant behaviors
Humans behave more prosocially when their actions are watched by others [Research in the past decade has demonstrated that testosterone is implicated in a wide spectrum of socially dominant behaviors [Contrasting with this view, the hypothesis that testosterone drives status-seeking via reputation building rather than dominance [The present paper is the first that aimed to distinguish between these two alternatives of boosting one’s social status that testosterone may act on. One option is that, in line with the social dominance hypothesis [Through what neurobiological pathways could testosterone modulate such complex social behaviors? Previously, exogenous testosterone was found to increase dopamine levels in the rat ventral striatum [The present study thus not only aimed to investigate if testosterone influences strategic prosociality, but also whether this is achieved by impacting reward-related computations. We employed a novel modeling approach, by combining reinforcement learning with diffusion decision models (RLDDM). This provided a more comprehensive account of the latent processes involved in prosocial decision-making than previous separate RL and DDM approaches [Male participants underwent a double-blind, between-subject, placebo-controlled, testosterone administration and then performed a reinforcement learning task (Fig. 