THE SPRAY THAT WILL GIVE US LOVE
On the Hormone That Creates Trust and Neutralizes Suspicion
OXYTOCIN IS A HORMONE RELEASED BY BREASTFEEDING WOMEN AND THE infants whom they are nursing. Studies conducted on primates reveal that it is responsible for the bond formed between mother and child immediately after birth, before they have managed to forge a deeper connection. The hormone is also released by both sexes during sexual orgasm and is therefore often called the “love hormone.” Oxytocin is a wonderful evolutionary mechanism that increases the chances that a newborn infant will survive, thus passing on genes from one generation to the next.
Before we have children of our own, many of us marvel at the ability of new mothers to find the energy resources needed to care for a newborn infant after nine exhausting months of pregnancy. They manage to do this within seconds of what is often a difficult and draining childbirth experience, without having had any opportunity to form an emotional bond with their child.
This is accomplished because the evolutionary development of primates, including humans, has supplied females with a hormone that makes bonding between mother and child completely instinctive. It even enables an infant to understand the importance of finding his mother’s breasts minutes after emerging into the world; infants are born with the instinct to suckle their mother’s milk.
Oxytocin is also connected to two known developmental disorders. An imbalance of oxytocin, especially a deficit of the hormone in the brain, is characteristically identified in those suffering from autism spectrum disorder. A lack of oxytocin is one of the reasons that children with autism spectrum disorder experience difficulty in exhibiting empathy toward others, understanding social situations, and trusting those who are close to them.
The opposite condition is noted in individuals suffering from an extremely rare neurological condition called William’s syndrome, which is characterized by a range of physiological and mental disturbances. These include heart conditions, digestive tract disorders, and elevated blood pressure. Their IQ levels are typically limited to 60 to 90 points, but their social skills are impressive. They exhibit empathy and the ability to recognize emotions in others at levels that are far superior to those of normal humans. They are also willing to trust others, even total strangers, almost blindly. Children suffering from William’s syndrome express love to everyone around them. This makes them vulnerable to sexual exploitation, as the exaggerated trust and desire to please others that they feel makes them easy prey for pedophiles. Neurologists posit that elevated production of oxytocin may be partially responsible for the social behaviors of individuals with William’s syndrome.
Given the important role oxytocin plays in creating bonds between mothers and infants, as well as its relation to social development disorders, it is reasonable to suppose that it also influences social behavior in healthy adults.
Oxytocin is a benign hormone that is harmless when introduced into the body in small doses (this is usually accomplished by using nose drops, similar to the nose drops used to ease the symptoms of the common cold). The Zurich experimenters had two groups of subjects play the trust game: one group received a dose of oxytocin before playing the game, while a control group was administered a placebo containing all the same elements except the active element. The results were unequivocal: members of the group receiving doses of oxytocin achieved much great cooperation. This cooperation was exhibited in both directions: proposers offered more (they trusted their counterparts more relative to the control group) and receivers gave proposers a larger share of what they received in return (they were more generous).
To rule out the possibility that oxytocin was simply relaxing the subjects in the experiment and thus indirectly making them more amenable to cooperation, the experimenters repeated the experiment using wine instead of oxytocin to relax subjects. The wine did indeed have the effect of making subjects feel more relaxed, but it had no effect on the amount of trust or generosity they exhibited.
Oxytocin, for all its wonders, can also have negative effects. An experiment that I recently conducted along with two of my students, Einav Hart and Shlomo Yisrael, revealed that oxytocin can reduce our abilities to recognize the intentions of others.1 In our experiment we made use of the television game Split or Steal, also discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. The subjects in the experiment viewed video clips of the game. During the course of the experiment they were asked to guess which actions the participants of the game would choose on the basis of the brief dialogue they conducted prior to choosing either split or steal. One group of subjects was administered oxytocin while a control group received a placebo. Although subjects were unable to tell whether they had received oxytocin or a placebo, those who were administered oxytocin were much worse at guessing the actions chosen by the Split or Steal participants than those in the control group. When we compared the reaction times of the two groups, we discovered that subjects receiving oxytocin invested much less effort in this task than those in the control group, making their guesses hastily. Why oxytocin should have this effect is fairly clear. We are most invested in identifying the intentions of others when we are suspicious of those around us. Since oxytocin dulls suspicions and boosts trust, it makes us more vulnerable to being manipulated by others.
The effects of oxytocin, both good and bad, make the use of the hormone potentially dangerous as a tool for manipulation. A spray called Liquid Trust, whose active ingredient is oxytocin, is now commercially available. It is promoted as a chemical that can influence buyers’ decisions in market interactions. The Liquid Trust Web page describes it as ideal for salespeople, lonely individuals seeking love, and managers and employees who want to influence their work environments or seek rapid promotion. The product’s advertisements promise “the world at your fingertips.” Is there a practical way to outlaw the use of oxytocin? It is unclear how a law banning its use could be effectively enforced, given that the hormone has no taste or smell and is virtually undetectable when sprayed directly into the air.
The optimistic way to view the results of experiments on oxytocin conducted to date is to note that it can increase the chances of cooperation between people and in that way improve many economic and social interactions. But there is a thorn in this rose. Imagine negotiators representing two nations locked in negotiations on a contentious political dispute deciding to use oxytocin (of their own volition, not due to external pressure) in an attempt to improve the negotiating atmosphere and increase trust. Let’s further imagine that the negotiations do indeed lead to a successful and satisfactory agreement due in part (but not solely) to the use of oxytocin. Would the public accept the legitimacy of such an agreement? I doubt it. Opponents of the agreement from both sides would claim, with some justification, that the negotiators were drugged into making concessions they would never have considered had they been fully sober.
Regardless of such imaginative scenarios, oxytocin illustrates the explicit connection between the way one feels and the way one thinks. It is a reminder that the hormone balance in one’s body even influences careful cognition; thus all thinking is, at some level, emotional.