Males of many species must allocate limited energy budgets between mating and parenting effort. The Challenge Hypothesis provides a framework for understanding these life-history trade-offs via the disparate roles of testosterone (T) in aggression, sexual behavior, and parenting. It predicts that males pursuing mating opportunities have higher T than males pursuing paternal strategies, and in humans, many studies indeed report that men who are fathers and/or pair-bonded have lower T than childless and/or unpaired men. However, the magnitude of these effects, and the influence of methodological variation on effect sizes, have not been quantitatively assessed. We meta-analyzed 114 effects from 66 published and unpublished studies covering four predictions inspired by the Challenge Hypothesis. We confirm that pair-bonded men have lower T than single men, and fathers have lower T than childless men. Furthermore, men more oriented toward pair-bonding or offspring investment had lower T. We discuss the practical meaningfulness of the effect sizes we estimate in relation to known factors (e.g., aging, geographic population) that influence men’s T concentrations.

许多物种的雄性必须在交配和育儿之间分配有限的能量预算。挑战假说提供了一个框架，用于通过睾丸激素（T）在攻击，性行为和养育中的不同作用来理解这些生命历史权衡。它预测，寻求交配机会的男性比追求父本策略的男性具有更高的T，并且在人类中，许多研究确实报告说，父亲和/或成对伴侣的男人比未育和/或未成对的男人具有更低的T。但是，尚未对这些影响的大小以及方法学变化对影响大小的影响进行定量评估。我们对来自66个已发表和未发表的研究的114种效应进行了荟萃分析，涵盖了受挑战假设启发的四个预测。我们确认，双胞胎男人的T低于单身男人，而父亲的T低于无子女的男人。此外，更倾向于配对或后代投资的男人的T较低。我们讨论了影响大小估计值与影响男人T浓度的已知因素（例如衰老，地理人口）有关的实际意义。