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Oxytocins,
Hugs, and a Smile Brings Immediate Cash -- say people close
to the Zurich trust study
23 Week
2005 /
Trust and money is not only built on
a smile, a hug and a few glasses of wine, it's built on
Oxytocin, a neurochemical that can be distilled into a nasal
spray and shot throught an airconditioning system, that can
be utilized to help ease the natural suspicion of
strangers.
• • People close to
the discovery say that it is the first direct evidence that
a hormone called oxytocin, which evolved 100 million years
ago to aid mating among fish and breast-feeding among
mammals, also promotes trust between human beings, the
scientists said.
• • The research stirred misgivings about
the potential for misuse by marketers or political
operatives who might use oxytocin to surreptitiously capture
a sales prospect or to prime a campaign crowd. The
scientists acknowledged the risk but discounted the
concern.
• • In an experiment whose results were
published in the current edition of the journal Nature,
researchers at the University of Zurich in Switzerland have
determined that people who inhaled half a dozen puffs of an
oxytocin nasal spray were measurably more likely to risk all
their money with a stranger, without consciously knowing
why.
• • "If I increase your level of oxytocin,
I can induce you to overcome your anxiety in trusting a
stranger," said a well-know Neuroeconomics professors. "It
is a [biochemical] signal we induce unknowingly all
the time by looking people in the eye or shaking someone by
the hand." The findings have powerful implications for
understanding the brain, Remove trust and you compromise
love, friendship, trade and
leadership."
• • "My conjecture is that it applies
broadly to all kinds of social interactions where your trust
could be abused," said economist Ernst Fehr in Zurich, the
senior member of the research team.
• • Although the
researchers set up their experiment to test the effects of
oxytocin on financial decisions, they believe the hormone is
the keystone of a normal social
life.
• • Trust is as crucial in love and
diplomacy as it is in finance. Social phobias, which hinge
on the inability to trust other people, are the third most
common mental health problem.
The finding are an important advance in understanding
the biology of human behavior, especially in the Art of
Selling one's goods, products or
services.
•• • Researchers have long known that
the hormone was important in the social behavior of
animals.
• • Oxytocin plays a role in human
childbirth, when it enhances uterine contractions during
labor and may be administered to ease a difficult birth. For
nursing mothers, it eases the production of breast
milk.
• • Until now, its role in human social
behavior had been a matter of
conjecture.
• • To investigate its effects, researchers
set up an experiment in which investors could choose to risk
money with strangers in a classic economics investment game.
The investors had to decide how much to invest without
knowing anything about their trading
partners.
• • "We were trying to understand why
people are so trusting with people they have never seen and
will never see again," Zak said.
• • In all, 178 students from universities
in Zurich participated.
• • The students were separated into groups
of investors and trustees, who were not allowed to
communicate with each other.
• • Each investor began the experiment with
a fund equal to about five Swiss francs that could be
invested with a trustee. Any investment would be
automatically tripled. The trustee then could decide how
much, if any, of the money would be paid to the
investor.
• • Both investor and trustee could take
home cash at the conclusion of the experiment, based on how
they managed the investments. The more the trustee withheld,
the larger his final cash payoff.
By design, the pseudo investors were caught in a
dilemma of playing a game with other people's money, but so
what.
///
ByLines:
Editors Note
More Articles
• Converging
News 232005 / TeleCom Buy Outs and Asset Seizure
Boom
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