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Stress makes men seek companionship and trust others more
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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Men respond to stress in the same way as women, by trying to strengthen social connections and seeking support from others.
It is believed that men and women react differently to stress: if women seek support in society in difficult times, turn to friends for help, then men, on the contrary, behave aggressively, reject other people's help and generally stop trusting others. Roughly speaking, men have a more pronounced ancient mechanism of reaction to stress, "fight or flight."
However, as research by psychologists from the University of Zurich (Switzerland) has shown, such a difference is nothing more than a gender stereotype. The experiment involved 67 young male students. Some of them had to complete a stress-related task: for example, give a public speech or solve a super-complex math problem. Others did approximately the same thing, but in a much easier version, that is, the math task was very simple, and the speech had to be given in an extremely friendly and pleasant environment. After completing the stressful - and not so stressful - tasks, the subjects underwent a series of behavioral and physiological tests.
The physiological response to stress was standard: increased heart rate and increased levels of the hormone cortisol. But the participants in the experiment also showed increased trust in others. After stress, they were asked to play an economic strategy game where they had to choose whether to let their partner earn or betray them; and so, those who experienced stress turned out to be unusually good and loyal partners. And the stronger the stress, the friendlier and more trusting the person became. The researchers also measured the level of aggression and risk-taking outside of a social context. In that case, there was no difference between the stressed and normal subjects.
The results of the research, published in the journal Psychological Science, indicate that the reaction to stress, firstly, depends on the social environment, and secondly, men react to stress in the same way as women, that is, they try to strengthen their own social connections. However, the authors of the work stipulate that women did not participate in the experiment, so they compared the experimental data on men only with the gender stereotype concerning women.