What motivates you as an adult may depend on the hormones you were exposed to as a fetus
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A new study by the HuMAN Lab, to be published in the journal Motivation Science, suggests that what people are motivated to do as adults may depend in part on the hormones they were exposed to during their prenatal development. In a study with a large sample, about half of them women, Schultheiss and colleagues determined participants’ motivational needs with a picture-story task and their prenatal exposure to testosterone and estradiol by measuring their ring finger length. Previous studies have shown that ring finger length is sensitive to exposure to testosterone and estradiol in the first trimester of pregnancy and stable thereafter when controlling for overall hand size. Typically, individuals with relatively long ring fingers were exposed to more testosterone and less estradiol prenatally; for individuals with relatively short ring fingers the opposite holds. Schultheiss and colleagues found ring finger length to be associated with individuals’ motivational needs for power and achievement. However, the associations were different for men and women and stronger overall in women. For instance, in women higher achievement motivation in adulthood was associated with shorter ring finger lengths suggestive of low testosterone and/or high estradiol exposure; in men the association tended to be reversed (see Figure).
Women with a particular variant of power motivation called inhibited power motive had a relatively longer ring finger on the right hand, compared to the left. Comments Schultheiss: “Our findings suggest that which incentives people crave in adulthood is rooted partly in the hormonal milieu that they were exposed to in the first three months of their existence. Our ring finger findings are just a marker for the effect that this hormonal milieu must have had on the developing brain.” As a next step, Schultheiss and colleagues plan study brain differences indexed by finger length variations and associated with motivational needs |
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The figure shows ring finger length in relation to index finger length as a control for overall finger length on the left-hand axis (digit ratio). Higher digit ratios reflect shorter ring fingers, lower digit ratios reflect longer ring fingers. In women, variations in the need for achievement (n Achievement) were associated with shorter ring fingers; in men they tended to be associated with longer ring fingers.
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