Ronay and von Hippel (2010) carried out a study to determine if men would take greater risks in the presence of an attractive female, than in the presence of a male.  In addition, they wanted to see if testosterone played a role in this behaviour.

They hypothesized that they would take greater risks as a result of intrasexual selection - that is, he who makes the greatest impression, gets the girl.

The sample was made up of 96 young adult Australian male skateboarders with a mean age of 21.58.  Participants were recruited at skateboard parks. 43 were assigned to the male-researcher condition and 53 were assigned to the female-researcher condition. Tests were conducted between 2 and 6 pm.

Skateboarders were asked to do one “easy trick” and one difficult trick which they could successfully complete approximately 50% of the time.  They were asked to do each trick 10 times.

After a break, they were asked to make 10 more attempts of each trick but this time in front of the same male researcher or an attractive 18-year-old female researcher who was blind to the hypothesis.  The attractiveness of the researcher was established by having 20 male raters view photos of potential female experimenters. The skateboarders’ attempts were coded for one of three outcomes: success, crash landing, or aborted attempt. High levels of aborted attempts would be seen as an indicator of low-risk taking.

Saliva samples were also collected at the conclusion of the experiment to measure testosterone. Heart rate was measured by having participants wear a Nordic sports watch. Measurements were taken immediately prior to the test and then measured throughout the task.

As expected, participants took greater risks on the difficult tricks in the presence of the female researcher - that is, they aborted the trick fewer times. In addition, testosterone levels were higher in the men that skateboarded in front of the female researcher than in front of the male researcher. There was no significant difference in the measure of heart rate between the two groups.

The study showed that young men take great physical risks when in the presence of an attractive woman and that testosterone may account for this behaviour.

According to evolutionary theory, this makes sense.  The increased risk-taking is a sign to potential mates that the male is healthy, strong, and dominant - that is, would be able to intimidate any potential rival.

• The experiment is well controlled. The attractiveness of the female researcher, the time of day, and the heart rate were all controlled for in this experiment.
• The experiment was also conducted under highly naturalistic conditions, leading to high ecological validity.
• The design was a repeated measures design. Order effects - such as fatigue - could have influenced the findings. It was also an independent samples design in that some had a female in the second set and some had a male researcher.
• The tricks that were tried in both groups cannot be standardized for "difficulty." This questions the validity of the measure of "aborted tries" as I sign of risk-taking.
• Although this could potentially be an example of intrasexual selection, it is difficult to establish that reproduction is actually the goal of the behaviour.
• Finally, there are ethical considerations in this study.  Although the participants agreed to be in the study, they were not aware that they were being observed for "mating behaviour."  This could be seen as embarrassing when they are debriefed and told the real aim of the experiment.  They would, of course, have the right to withdraw their data.