The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

by John Coates

Women, for their part, have very different biologies from men. They produce on average about 10–20 percent of the amount of testosterone as men, and they have not been exposed to the same organizing effects of prenatal androgens, so they too may be less prone to the winner effect than young men. Women’s stress response also differs substantially from men’s. One psychologist, Shelley Taylor, and her colleagues have in fact argued that the fight-or-flight reaction is more of a male response, and is not the default reaction to threat for women in quite the same way. A woman will indeed experience fight-or-flight if faced by a grizzly bear, just as a man will; but Taylor thinks that a woman’s natural reaction to threat, at least within the social situations that are today our normal environment, is what she calls the “tend-and-befriend” reaction, an urge to affiliation. She reasons that if you have children to care for, tend-and-befriend makes more sense than launching into a fist fight or running away.