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Building trust via nasal spray
Quote:
A Chemical For Trust?
Shakespeare told us to "love all, trust a few," even to "trust none, for oaths are straws." Despite such warnings, trust has always been at the centre of all human dealings -- romantic, commercial, or political -- even if the reasons for it have been murky.
But now Swiss researchers say they have finally isolated the secret: In oxytocin, we trust.
University students who inhaled the hormone in a nasal spray were discovered to be far more trusting of one another -- eager, in fact, to hand over money to strangers in investment deals.
The results suggest trust can be bottled and used to forge commercial relationships. Oxytocin levels have long been known to spike with sexual climax or influence the production of mothers' milk, but the new study suggests they are also "the biological basis of trust among humans."
"We find that intranasal administration of oxytocin causes a substantial increase in trusting behaviour," a research team said.
The team was led by Dr. Michael Kosfeld of the University of Zurich, whose findings appear in the journal Nature.
"Of course, this finding could be misused to induce trusting behaviours that selfish actors subsequently exploit," the team wrote. "However our findings may have positive clinical implications for patients with mental disorders."
The study already has some cynical scientists musing about whether political operatives will try to crop-dust crowds with oxytocin at rallies, whereas more hopeful researchers see the hormone as a potential boon in treating people with social phobias, or rare genetic disorders that cause children to trust everyone they meet.
Oxytocin -- not to be confused with Oxycontin, the increasingly popular painkiller gaining a reputation as "hillbilly heroin" -- has long been linked to sex, reproduction and motherhood.
Mammals produce it in parts of the brain that regulate social behaviour. The Swiss team pointed out that the hormone lets wild animals "overcome their natural avoidance of proximity." Farmers use the chemical to get cows to produce more milk.
For humans, the hormone has been produced synthetically since the 1950s, used by obstetricians to help induce labour. Naturally occurring oxytocin is more fun, but has its pitfalls. In fact, some sex counsellors warn new lovers not to jump into bed with one another, as orgasms increase levels of oxytocin and can thus impair judgment about a mate's character.
So in a sense, trust has always been associated with the hormone. But news has now arrived of oxytocin's more lucrative applications.
The Swiss researchers had 200 male university students take part in trust experiments. Half of the participants snorted oxytocin, and the others took a placebo. They were randomly assigned to be "investors" or "trustees" and given 12 "monetary units" to invest.
Investors were given the option of placing none, one-third, two-thirds or all of their money with the trustee, who promised to share whatever returns resulted. Nearly half (45 per cent) of the oxytocin group forked over all of their money, compared with only one-fifth (21 per cent) of the placebo group.
"Our data [show] that oxytocin increases investors' trust considerably," the researchers said.
Yet being trusted doesn't make you more trustworthy.
Every investment was then tripled, but the "trustees" had total control on how much they skimmed and how much they gave back to the "investors." Oxytocin or no oxytocin, rip-offs occurred equally frequently.
"Trustees given oxytocin do not show more trustworthy behaviour," the study found.
The researchers wanted to make sure oxytocin affects trust and not merely aversion to risk, so they ran another test in which they sat investors down at computers to make investments, and assigned returns randomly.
With trust and the human element taken out of the equation, both groups of investors behaved identically, and were far less willing to risk their money.
Commentators say that the study has implications for just about everyone who takes an interest in any human behaviour -- from love, to politics, to marketing and beyond.
"Some may worry about the prospect that political operators will generously spray the crowd with oxytocin at rallies of their candidates," said University of Iowa neurologist Antonio Damasio in a commentary in Nature.
"The scenario may be rather too close to reality for comfort, but those with such fear should note that current marketing techniques . . . may well exert their effects through the natural release of molecules such as oxytocin in response to well-crafted stimuli."
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So two things here,
1) Orgasms can impair your judgement - no news there
and
2) Is this more proof that we're just a bag of blood and hormones that thinks we're doing the driving when in fact we're not. To show that <b>trust</b> can be chemically induced is pretty far reaching - in the future, just watch out for Nasal-Spray Salesmen! |