The eminent Stanford neurobiologist and science writer Robert Sapolsky has a 1998 collection of his highly entertaining essays on science and society called The Trouble with Testosterone. In the title essay, Sapolsky explains why the myth that testosterone causes aggression is wrong. Using testosterone as an example, he spells out the reasons that a simple one-to-one relationship like testosterone causing aggression rarely holds in biology--there are too many mitigating factors that get in the way. Sapolsky does concede, though, that gargantuan doses of testosterone, amounts that a number of well-known baseball players have used, do produce unprovoked aggression. This has been called "roid rage". Testosterone is one of the anabolic steroids, substances that cause the body grow and develop.
Some years ago, our lab began exploring the effects of testosterone on cooperation. In 2005, we reported that when men were distrusted in a monetary exchange task, their levels of "high octane" testosterone, known at DHT, spiked. Distrust in this experiment meant that a stranger had not sent them any, or much money. This mattered because money sent to another person would triple in value, earning the recipient a healthy payday. The spike in DHT predicted that those who were distrusted would return like for like--when given a chance to share money in return, the distrusted, high-DHT men sent nothing. Women, on the other hand, had no increase in DHT and nearly always returned something to a stranger who had sent them money, even if they were distrusted by being sent very little. So, we just proved that women are nicer than men. And testosterone was the culprit.
In December, 2009, we went several steps further. We created "alpha males" by administering testosterone to men to demonstrate that testosterone caused men to behave badly. Testosterone acts as an oxytocin antagonist and we had previously shown that oxytocin makes men more generous. Like Sapolsky, we found there was trouble with testosterone, but that it was more complicated than we had at first thought.
In this experiment, we drew four tubes of blood from our participants and then had them rub a gel on their shoulders. The gel was either a prescription testosterone replacement called Androgel
I just finished reading Theodore Malloch's wonderful new book Being Generous (Templeton Press, 2009) that investigates the reasons for and results of generosity. The book draws on a variety of evidence to show that generosity is not only good for society, but good for the individual. Throughout this inspiring book, pithy and interesting one page biographies appear of well-known givers and their motivations for helping others. These range from Johann Sebastian Bach, John D. Rockefeller, and Mother Theresa to Bill and Melinda Gates.
Giving USA reports that in 2005, individuals in the US gave $199 billion dollars to charity. In the same year, 65 million Americans spent an average of 50 hours volunteering to help others. Using the average US hourly wage, this constitutes an additional charitable donation valued at $60 billion. While this pales in comparison to the federal deficit, $259 billion is a big chunk of change. Could science explain this extraordinary generosity?
My lab has been investigating the biological basis for generosity, focusing on the neuroactive hormone oxytocin. We were specifically interested in generosity, or "liberality in giving," rather than people simply giving small gifts to others. Many people have an urge to give just a bit, but we wanted to know why someone would ever give more than they had to. We used a task called the Ultimatum Game in which people are randomly and anonymously paired by computer in a large lab. After extensive instruction and without a speck of deception, people are endowed with a sum of money like $40 and then asked to propose a split of this money to the other person in their pair. No communication before or after the proposal is allowed. The receiver then decides if s/he wants to accept the proposal or reject it. If accepted, the money is paid privately to each person and the experiment ends. But, if the proposal is rejected, both individuals earn nothing.
How much would you offer as a split? In Western countries, offers less than 30% of the endowment are nearly always rejected. Why? Easy--it is simply unfair. We turned this question on its head: why would anyone offer more than one needs to have the offer accepted? We did this by having each person make decisions both as proposer and to identify their smallest acceptable offer as responder. Later, we randomized which role they would actually play and this determined their earnings. Generosity is the difference between what one offers and the smallest amount one is willing to accept.
I had a hunch that oxytocin, which I had already shown causes us to trust others as I discussed in a recent article in Scientific American would also make people generous. So, we infused 40IU oxytocin into half the participants using a nasal spray, and similarly administered salt water to the other half, without them knowing which one they had gotten. They then made decisions in the Ultimatum Game. In a 2007 publication, my team reported that oxytocin increased generosity by 80% compared to the placebo group.
This was a huge effect in an experiment where we tormented people by putting two teaspoons of liquid up their noses. The next question was why oxytocin caused generosity.
Giving to others is often prompted by understanding their perspective. How would you feel if you lost your house to a hurricane or fire, or found yourself homeless after looking for work for a year. We can image how awful these situations would be and this motivates us to help others. Shortly after the August 2005 hurricane Katrina disaster I asked my lab who had donated money to the relief efforts. Several students raised their hands and when I asked them why, most related highly emotional stories of suffering they had seen on TV. The stories were often so emotion-laden that their eyes teared up on the telling.
This gave me and my graduate student Jorge Barraza an idea to run an experiment that simulated this effect. We had participants watch one of two 100 second videos. Both videos feature a father with his four year old son. The son is bald from chemotherapy due to his terminal brain cancer. In the emotional video, the father discussion how it feels to know his son is dying. In the neutral video, the father and son are having a day at the zoo and cancer and death are not mentioned. You can see the video in an earlier PT Blog I wrote. I showed the emotional video recently to group of lawyers at a conference and one-third of them cried so much I had to stop my lecture. If it makes lawyers cry, you know that regular humans are really affected by it.
We drew blood before and after people watched one of the two videos and found that doing nothing more watching the emotional video produced a huge 157% spike in oxytocin levels. Oxytocin levels actually fell for those who watched the neutral video. We then asked people how they felt after seeing the videos. For the emotional video, the change in oxytocin was correlated with feelings of empathy (after we controlled for the distress people reported that correlated with the stress hormone cortisol). Oxytocin connects us to others and lets us understand their emotions.
The most amazing part was that after the videos people made decisions in the Ultimatum Game so we could see if empathic engagement would make people more generous towards another person in the lab. It did. Generosity towards another meant that the giver earned less money for his or her participation in this long and unpleasant experiment.
As participants were leaving the experiment, we also gave them a chance to donate some of their earnings to charity. One-third of the participants did so, averaging a six dollar donation (this was about one-quarter of the average earnings). Who donated? Those who were the most generous and most empathically engaged by the video.
It may very well be the case that those profiled in Being Generous release more oxytocin than others and this partially explains their generosity. Oxytocin connects us to others and social connections are a powerful way to increase one's own happiness. If you want to connect to others, being generous is a great start. You can follow Malloch in this--he is donating all book royalties to the charity portal Global Giving. If you would like to choose a project to donate to, go to www.globalgiving.com. You just might feel the joy of generosity.
There is an enormous amount of trust we show to strangers without even paying attention to it: the pilot flying your airplane, the chef preparing your dinner, or the taxi driver taking you across town. We often trust strangers with our lives, blind to their identities or intentions. We do this because most of the time it works out just fine. I experienced an extreme form of stranger-trust when I went to dinner with friends at a trendy "dine in the dark" restaurant in Los Angeles. These restaurants, first started in Zurich, Switzerland by blind clergyman J
Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, is best known for the idea in his 1776 The Wealth of Nations that self-interested behavior leads to the best outcome for society as if through the working of an invisible hand. But Smith was an intellectual rock star before The Wealth of Nations. His 1759 book The Theory of Moral Sentiments catapulted him to fame by presenting what philosophers and theologians had always wanted: An explanation of good and evil.
Morality, Smith said, came from "fellow feeling" or our sympathy for others. We are, Smith argued, discomfited by seeing others in distress. This motivates us to engage in costly but socially beneficial acts like helping those in need. He called this the "healing consolation of mutual sympathy." You know this yourself: it is uncomfortable to see someone suffer physically or emotionally. And we ourselves suffer if our actions have led to another's suffering. Today we would call this empathy (a word coined in 1858 by German philosopher Rudolf Lotze (1817-1881) and therefore unavailable to Smith). We are undeniably emotionally connected to others. But why?
Recent research at the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies (CNS) has not only found that moral sentiments are real and measurable, but we have been able to manipulate these mechanisms in human brains to cause people to be moral in the lab. To understand how moral sentiments operate, I developed the Empathy-Generosity-Punishment (EGP) mathematical model. Based on principles in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, the model shows that empathy varies according to the distress one observes in others and this can motivate costly helping behaviors, including generosity with resources. The model predicts that generosity is more likely when we take another's perspective, and when our offer of help to another can be rejected as insufficient.
A body of evidence developed at CNS has demonstrated that the neuroactive hormone oxytocin is the brain basis for empathy and helps us understand another's emotional state. For example, a recent CNS study with graduate student Jorge Barraza found a direct relationship between oxytocin released in blood and the subjective experience of empathy when participants watched an emotionally charged video about a four year old boy with terminal brain cancer (see movie here). Those who were more empathically engaged were more generous when asked to share resources they controlled with a stranger in the lab. Infusing synthetic oxytocin into people caused them (relative to those given a placebo), to be 80% more generous towards a stranger.
While oxytocin amplifies the empathy response in the EGP model, studies at CNS have shown another hormone, testosterone inhibits empathy by blocking the action of oxytocin. When we administered synthetic testosterone to men, we made them less generous when they were asked to split money with a stranger. We also found that these "alpha males" were more likely to punish those who were ungenerous towards them (!). While oxytocin increases empathy, testosterone inhibits it, making men stingy and selfish. By changing participants' neurologic states using oxytocin and testosterone, we showed that we can directly cause them to be virtuous--in these studies, to be more generous.
So which Adam Smith is correct: unbridled self-interest or fellow-feeling? Just as individuals are not fully rational or irrational, neither are we purely other-regarding nor entirely self-interested. We can be both empathic and insensitive, and we constantly seek a balance between these two extremes in responding to different social, economic and institutional contexts we find ourselves in. As much as we say otherwise, our behavior is also influenced by the perceptions of others around us.
Our studies and the EGP model show that the brain circuit that produces moral behaviors depends critically on sufficient childhood nurturing, a stable the legal-political environment, and the social support we receive. Without these, moral behaviors recede. When these elements are present, morality is high and we have shown also shown that happiness increases. This is big news: oxytocin not only connects us to others by increasing our empathy, it also makes us happier! Read the original research here.
Adam Smith was right: we are moral creatures because we are empathic. Research at CNS reveals the science behind Smith's insights: we are virtuous because of the moral molecule, oxytocin. Adam Smith said it best, "Whatever appears to be the proper object of gratitude, appears to deserve reward; and that, in the same manner, whatever appears to be the proper object of resentment, appears to deserve punishment."
If you accept evolution, you must oppose over-regulation of the economy
Political liberals and conservatives butt heads on several topics: the size of the welfare state, teaching evolution in the schools, and the amount of economic regulation. Actually, these are all same issue. Political bulwarks notwithstanding, those on both sides of these issues often reveal ignorance of their commonalities. This is one cause of obstinate political conflicts.
Here's the resolution: biological systems are complex, nonlinear, and adaptive. This irks social conservatives because such a system has no place for a God who is intervening in life's daily activities. No one is in charge in biology. Creatures mutate and those that are more successful at leaving offspring increase their number. If a mutation is detrimental, creatures with it leave fewer offspring and may become extinct. Competition for scarce resources drives this effect so plants and animals evolved to use resources efficiently. Call this biological creative destruction--species adapt or disappear.
The laws of biological evolution apply directly to that human brainchild, economic trade. Businesses that adapt to customers' needs better use their scarce resources more efficiently and "reproduce" faster. This drives out less efficient companies. Think Wal-Mart. And Google. These initially mutant forms either survive and increase their market share or go extinct. Just as with biological creatures, even successful businesses face competitive pressure from the next innovative mutant business. No one is in charge. Call this economic creative destruction. This irks liberals because it shows that no one can or should direct the economy.
Just as a mouse with two legs is less well-adapted to its environment than is a four-legged mouse, a business that cannot survive a recession is not well-adapted to its environment and will go bankrupt. When an animal dies, its remaining energy is recycled as food for predators and insects that consume it. In the same way, the physical and human assets of a bankrupt business are recycled into companies that are better adapted to their environment. Scarce resources drive adaptation and efficiency. If we bailout losing business, we don't allow resources to be recycled to better uses, driving efficiency and adaptation.
Yes, if you have lost your job during this recession it is awful. But, new jobs are created every day and these can be found. Bailout out failing firms is analogous to using scarce biological resources to save the two-legged mouse. One could do this, but this is just throwing good resources away--this will not stop the mouse's inevitable end due to maladaption. Regulation undergirds economic exchange and is necessary, but having government officials micromanage businesses ignores the wisdom of millions of people voting with their wallets every day. The opinion of the millions will always win out.
In fact, "bailouts" are much worse than just wasting resources. Without scarce resources to drive competition, there is no incentive for people to think of new and better businesses. No failure, no innovation. It is innovation that increases living standards. Raising incomes gives us greater ability to reduce hunger, disease, infant mortality, and improve education. Higher incomes also increase trust in other people, and raise our happiness (e.g. see my research on this here).
The main point is that there is no free lunch: resources are always limited and biological and economic adaptation is driven by scarcity. Just as no one controls biological evolution, no one controls economic evolution. There are substantial costs of trying to over-regulate the economy, both in higher taxes but also in reduced innovation and lower living standards. Seeking to manage all economic transactions has been tried in the Soviet Union (and Communist China, and North Korea and Cuba, etc.) and these failed spectacularly because of the lack of adaptation and innovation. Totalitarian economic models are counter to our human nature of exploration, self-direction, and reciprocity. The imposition of over-regulation violates not only the human desire for self-determination, but also the physical laws that govern all of life.
This is the best op-ed from a class Michael Shermer and I teach at Claremont Graduate University called "Brain, Evolution, and Society". It was written by Andrew Shaindlin, your guest blogger.
Despite what you've been hearing, America has a surplus.
Not the financial kind. The mental kind. We have an untapped pool of brainpower waiting to be applied to solving problems and absorbing information. And it's time we did something about it.
In a talk at the Web 2.0 Conference in April 2008, Clay Shirky (adjunct professor at New York University) put a name to the excess intellectual capacity currently being used to analyze what happened on Desperate Housewives last week. He called it America's "cognitive surplus."
Cumulatively, said Shirky, Americans spend an astounding 100 million hours watching just the ads on television - every weekend. Add to that the time spent updating Facebook pages and playing video games and pretty soon you're talking real time. Shirky's observation hardly scratches the surface: "This is a pretty big surplus," he says. Gee, do you think?
Why is this a surplus? Because, by definition, those hundreds of millions of hours aren't being used productively. Sure, we all need some "down time," and it's nice to take a break from the grind of work. But just think about the potential for creating a different kind of surplus - a financial one - if just a fraction of the time wasted on Wii boxing or LOLcats was spent, instead, in pursuit of a way to hone our mental acuity.
The Onion, a national humor publication, carried a mock headline in its July 14, 2004 issue, illustrating perfectly the time wasted on commercial airline flights. "Copies of Da Vinci Code Litter Crash Site," the headline declared. A doctored photo accompanying the story showed a rescue worker surveying the tangled wreckage of a downed airliner, surrounded by dozens of copies of Dan Brown's intellectually lightweight best-selling thriller.
Look around at the frequent fliers on your own flights from Seattle to San Diego and from L. A. to London and you'll see it plain as day.
Locked in a seated position for hours at a time, Americans will choose the cognitive equivalent of a tranquilizer to avoid thinking about anything more difficult than this week's Word Search. And of course, that's our privilege. We love our freedom, and if we define "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" as three hours of Large Print Easy Sudoku, that's our inalienable right.
But maybe it's time to offer a way for the more ambitious to engage in something more rewarding. The result might just be a greater long-term return on the time Americans spend with "nothing to do."
So here's my modest proposal.
Want to curl up with The Bourne Supremacy in paperback, or camp out in seat 24B engrossed in Kindergarten Cop on your iPod Touch? Nobody is going to stop you. But in the next seat, I'll crack open the collected short stories of Vladimir Nabokov, or dive into a book explaining the importance of evolutionary theory. Or maybe I'll watch a documentary, or a performance of Agamemnon.
"But you can do that now," you say. "What's the big deal? Go ahead with your egghead pursuits and leave me in silence to finish my Wolverine collector's edition!" And I'll be happy to, secure in the knowledge that, upon completing a test covering the material I read or viewed during the same flight, I'll be rebated up to 30% of the price of my plane ticket - depending on how well I've absorbed the material.
That's right: I propose a national rebate on self-improvement, a return on an American investment in perspicacity. For every unit of self-directed learning or productive mental work, conscientious travelers will earn credits toward the cost of their travel.
There's no obligation. Freedom of choice is preserved. If you don't want to help absorb some of the nation's cognitive surplus, you certainly do not have to. You can still pay full retail for airplane tickets and watch How Stella Got Her Groove Back on your personal video player.
Nationally, the result of even a few passengers passing up Tom Clancy for Charles Dickens will be a more learned and liberally educated public, more prepared for intellectual understanding, for knowledge work, and better able to solve tomorrow's problems. Folks who slept through American Lit, who snoozed through Economics, or bailed on Business 101 will have a chance to regain a spot at the head of the class.
We'll also get a more engaged, insightful and educated person to talk to during our next long flight - as well as a more productive, analytical and effective corps of American problem solvers in the long run.
So put down the Sudoku, save a few dollars, and read along with me: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness..."
It first happened on an airplane. Returning home from a long five days in Washington, DC, I allowed myself to stop working and watch the movie Million Dollar Baby. I hadn't seen it and wondered how a movie with such an awful title could have won the Best Picture Oscar. I had only the vaguest sense of what the movie was about.
Six years earlier and recently married, I had informed my wife that "chick flicks" were out. Take a girlfriend, I implored, not me. Unless something is blown up or Schwarzenegger, Stallone, or Eastwood was in the movie, I had screws to turn and holes to drill in my spare time. Million Dollar Baby did star Eastwood so it was in my realm. Since that time I had had two daughters, so the Walt Disney Company supplies most of the movies I watch.
At the climax of Million Dollar Baby, the tear floodgates opened. And I mean opened wide. I was aware that all the snuffling and slurping was inappropriate, but I couldn't stop. I cried so much that I think the guy next to me thought I was having a breakdown (have you seen that movie!?)
So, why do we cry at movies? Cognitively, we know that the story we are watching is (usually) fictional and the actors are paid to play on our emotions. But still we can't help it. I can understand crying when you see your child or spouse get a painful medical procedure, or even when you watch an injured person on the TV news, but at a movie? In previous posts, I introduced the neuropeptide oxytocin as modulating empathy. Oxytocin engages brain circuits that make us care about others, even complete strangers. Perhaps surprisingly, oxytocin engages at the smallest suggestion that someone wants to connect to us. I've showed, for example, that a person's brain releases oxytocin when he or she is entrusted with money by a stranger. Could oxytocin make us cry in movies?
To see if movies cause our brains to release oxytocin, my graduate student Jorge Barraza designed an experiment where participants watched a video from St. Jude Children's Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. One group saw a part in which a father discusses his four year-old son Ben's terminal brain cancer. The other half watched as Ben and his father spend a day at the zoo. You can see the video here.
Yes, it is really emotional. OK, take a short break to recover.
In research that will soon appear in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, those who saw the highly emotional part of the video had a 47% increase in oxytocin as measured in blood. Controlling for distress (which was associated with elevated stress hormones), empathy was highly correlated with the spike in oxytocin. This is the first evidence for the speculation, often from my mouth, that oxytocin is a physiologic signature for empathy.
We also had subjects make decisions that involved money and other people to see if those who were empathically engaged are nicer. Participants were paid for agreeing to let us stick them with a needle (twice). When given a chance to share this money with someone else in the lab being similarly tortured, we found that empathy predicted generosity towards a stranger. Yes, these people were generous with their hard-earned blood money! And they couldn't even see the people to whom they were giving money, it was all done by computer. Their generosity didn't even merit a thank you or a smile in return. Empathy made them generous anyway.
At the end of the experiment, we also asked if participants wanted to donate some of their money to the American Red Cross or St. Jude Hospital. Many of them did, even those who had already given money away to a stranger in the lab. We were surprised to discover that some people donated all of their remaining money to charity. Can you guess who responded the most to the emotional video? Yes, women released more oxytocin and were more empathic than men. They also gave twice as much to charity.
So, we cry at movies because the oxytocin in the human brain is imperfectly tuned. It does not differentiate between actual human beings and flickering images of human beings. Either one is enough to kick oxytocin into high gear and impel our empathy. And it reveals why men like me avoid chick flicks--we don't want to be seen bawling when the guy finally gets the girl.
Well, if Clint Eastwood can cry in Million Dollar Baby, I guess I can shed a couple of tears, too.
Several years ago I stopped the execution of Teddy by adopting him. Sorry, "put down" is the polite euphemism. Today, Teddy is 98 in human-equivalent years. Inevitably, I will soon have to decide if I should spend thousands of dollars to extend Teddy's life when he undoubtedly begins to suffer from cancer, kidney failure, or some other ghastly malady. In public lectures, I have often asked who would spend $5,000 to save their dog's life. Typically, one-half of the hands go up. When I ask who would spend $10,000, many hands remain up. Why do we care so much about our dogs?
To the best of our knowledge, about 15,000 years ago people in East Asia domesticated wolves to guard huts, help with the hunt, and to be companions. Selective breeding has produced the roughly 400 types of dogs today. A 2004 study by the American Animal Hospital Association reported that 94% of U.S. pet owners believe their pets have human traits. If recent reports on tabloid TV and my own experiences living in Southern California are any guide, many people, including media magnets like Britney, Paris, and Jessica have gone farther, dressing up their dogs in human clothes and taking them on "dates." Yipes!
Why do we pamper our pooches so much? This is where science can help us. You may remember from earlier posts that oxytocin has two primary characteristics: hungry and fuzzy. Hungry means it is looking for attachment figures. The brains of highly social animals like humans have evolved to make caring for others rewarding, and we are on the lookout for rewards. Fuzzy means the oxytocin-addled brain does not pick attachment targets very precisely. Because dogs are around us, they are available attachment targets.
Some evidence: a 2003 study in the Veterinary Journal showed then when people pet a dog, oxytocin is released in the dog and in the human. The uniquely mammalian hormone oxytocin facilitates that hallmark of mammals, care for offspring, by activating reward circuits in the brain. An earlier post described research from my lab showing that touch between humans primes the brain to release oxytocin and causes people to sacrifice money to help a stranger. Dogs love to be pet. The oxytocin response leads to reciprocal rewards, reinforcing human-to-dog bonding.
Now look at who we see "babying" dogs. Often, these are successful young women who have delayed reproduction due to career opportunities or an extended period of mate selection. The dogs they choose to dress up and take out are tiny Chihuahua-type dependents. Huum, perhaps you're seeing a pattern: delayed reproduction has moved the nurturing oxytocin system to seek an infant-substitute as a target. But, we can all be oxytocin-ed into treating our dogs like our children. Oxytocin makes us treat strangers like family, and dogs like humans. It's that powerful.
As I mentioned in an earlier post oxytocin is also released when we are shown trust by another person. In my experiments, this occurs when one person gives money to another person. Classic research in Journal of Contemporary Ethnography showed that people with dogs are judged to be more trustworthy. Why? Dogs are very dependent on humans, so one cannot have a healthy dog without being a dependable person. It is likely that dog owners have greater oxytocin levels than non-dog owners due to repeated petting, providing a physiologic rationale for our have-a-dog-seem-more-trustworthy intuition. When I walk Teddy, children and adults alike approach me to pet him, and a conversation almost always begins. Conversation is the basis for building social relationships.
Oxytocin also reduces stress levels and makes us more likely to reach out toward others. Let's be honest, it is hard to be a grump when you walk in the house and your dog is happy to see you. This is why many hospitals use "canine therapy" to cheer up patients.
Dogs are our companions, and make us happier, healthier and nicer people. That's a neat trick for a wolf's relative. So what if we sometime dress them up like humans. Yes, dogs really are our best friends. So how much would you pay to keep your dog alive?
The Power of a Handshake: How Touch Sustains Personal and Business Relationships
Written with Susan Kuchinskas
A solid handshake is more important for landing a job than your resume, according to research from the University of Iowa. This is something anyone in sales knows implicitly. But they might be surprised to learn that the power of a handshake is rooted not in competition, but in empathy -- and even love.
Legend has it that the practice of clasping the right hands developed to ensure that neither man could wield a weapon at close range. But it may, instead, have its root in the age old need to connect with other people. It's a first step toward affiliation: the building of a bond with another person.
Neuroscientists have shown that when we are trusted by a stranger, this engages the same brain systems as other kinds of social bonds, from friendship to the love of a parent for a child to the love of your spouse. These bonds are maintained through oxytocin (ox-ee-TOE-sin), a simple brain chemical ancient in origin. Recent research from Zak's neuroeconomics lab has shown that the human brain uses oxytocin to unconsciously assess if a person is trustworthy using our memory of past encounters and all of our senses, including touch. If the stranger is a good match for other trustworthy people, the brain releases oxytocin, telling us it is safe to trust.
At the same time, oxytocin causes the release of another brain chemical, dopamine, in the brain's reward center. This little charge helps us associate a trustworthy person with pleasure. The next time we meet this person, the trust assessment happens more quickly. This is how oxytocin encourages what's called "pro-social behavior." That's all the positive behaviors and feelings we share with others: love, trustworthiness, generosity, and compassion.
Oxytocin is like social glue, reminding us to stick close to friends. It's also an economic lubricant, allowing us to extract economic value from social interactions. Research from Zak's lab revealed that oxytocin reinforces social values. Inhaling oxytocin makes people more trusting and more generous. It also increases empathy-- the ability not to just see another person's side of things, but to feel the way he or she must feel. But how do we get the feel of another?
George Stewart, the associate professor of management and organizations in the Tippie College of Business who performed the handshake study, says that a warm handshake sets the tone for the rest of the job interview.
Research from Zak's lab published this month in Evolution and Human Behavior shows why: Touch primes the brain to release oxytocin. In Zak's experiment, half the participants received a 15-minute massage and then played an economic game in which they exchanged real money. After being trusted by a stranger with money in the hope that they'd reciprocate, the brains of participants who got a massage released much more oxytocin than those who simply rested alone. Amazingly, those who received massages returned 243 percent more money to the stranger who showed them trust than those who rested.
The oxytocin system, which can be fired up by touch, allowed us, in ancient times, to enter into economic exchange with others. Even in today's global economy, touch is vitally important to doing business. Our feelings about someone else, and the pleasure we feel in cooperating, is the foundation for trade with others. And it all starts with a handshake.
Susan Kuchinskas is the author of The Chemistry of Connection, available in 2009 from New Harbinger. Her blog, Hug the Monkey, is recognized as one of the most authoritative sources of oxytocin information on the Internet. Paul J. Zak is the Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California and Professor of Economics and Neurology. His lab discovered the role of oxytocin in facilitating trust between strangers. His new book Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy is available from Princeton University Press.
56-year-old Keith Walendowski of Wisconsin isn't, unfortunately, the first midwestern American man to greet a loved one's perceived betrayal with the business-end of a sawn-off shotgun. Nor will he be the last. What is unusual about the July incident is that Walendowski's "victim" -- found among the household garbage when the police came to arrest him -- was, in fact, a lawnmower, whose "betrayal" was refusing to start once too often.
So what? Another quaint anecdote about small-town middle-America eccentricity: nothing of relevance here for us "normal" folk. We would never dream of shooting our lawnmower. Or, say, slapping a recalcitrant Xerox machine. Or getting out of a stalled car and kicking it. Or shouting "You useless piece of junk!", in various shades of rage, at whatever sprite-haunted household appliance was currently ruining our day, our week, our life.
So our question is: Why is the world full of supposedly inanimate objects that are out to get us?
Take that uniquely malicious gremlin that resides in your laptop (and now you can stop even pretending that you don't know what we're talking about). It's never driven you, for instance, to be standing on your balcony with $1,000 worth of state-of-art IT equipment clutched above your head, and the intensely vivid image in your mind of the cursed thing hitting the concrete four stories below and shattering into a thousand pieces -- gremlin and all. No? Just us?
Conjuring the image of smashing your computer was therapeutic. The same flashbulb-therapy that apparently most parents (and some press-ganged babysitter friends) experience when they briefly imagine throwing interminably-mewling babies down stairs. But why household appliances?
There's a two-fold answer. First, we have the relatively conventional idea that, "Mind-reading has created a spirit-haunted world." In our evolutionary past, it was adaptive to "take the intentional stance" -- to "mind-read", or impute motives -- to various elements in our environment. The ability to imagine that, say, a glimpsed saber-tooth was planning to eat you; or a seemingly broken-winged bird was faking so as to divert you from her brood; or a pair of jackals were plotting to raid your kill, would have enhanced our ancestors' survival chances.
The ability to imagine that, say, the capricious River Spirit required thanks in the form of a libation of fish, or that the wrathful Volcano Spirit demanded an animal (or human) sacrifice, would not. As "selfish gene machines", we really shouldn't be squandering our valuable resources on placating non-existent nature spirits. Or indeed shooting our own lawnmowers.
But here's the thing. Human cognitive-behavioral systems are the belated end-products of a billion-year process characterized by the repeated, thrifty and opportunistic re-jigging of old designs for new and approximate purposes. The modern human-mind-as-palimpsest is the eventual result of on-the-fly evolutionary processes continually "over-writing" new functions onto old. The resultant systems (like mind-reading) prove flexible and robust, but also somewhat fuzzy.
Take another such cognitive-behavioral system: THOMAS ('The Human Oxytocin-Mediated Attachment System'). An ancient mammal hormone that promotes social bonding, oxytocin recently hit the news again due to a radical research revelation about its role in human maternal care. Simply put: the higher a mother's oxytocin levels at birth, the stronger the resultant mother-child bond.
THOMAS traces its mammalian evolutionary roots from rodents, where it promotes pair-bonding, up through primates, where the hormone supports various sophisticated social behaviors, such as friendship coalitions. By the time it emerges full-blown in humans, THOMAS promotes bonding to lovers, relatives and friends; colleagues, neighbors and pets; and, more "fuzzily", to gardens, cars, and household appliances.
THOMAS is powerfully motivating: a "hungry" system as well as a "fuzzy" one. This combination makes it likely to occasionally target "inappropriate" objects. Our ancestors might, for example, have "fuzzily" come to regard a favorite fruit tree or watering-pool as a "friend". Unconvinced? Try persuading your young daughter to give up her comfort blanket before she's ready. Or ask daddy (again) why he won't throw out his filthy ancient one-eyed teddy bear.
THOMAS is more likely to do inappropriate "hungry-fuzzy targeting" when natural objects of affection are scarce. A 56-year-old single man still living at home with his mother is a prime candidate for a THOMAS mis-attachment. Because, of course, Walendowski didn't hate his lawnmower. He loved it. Until it betrayed him once to often, and he expressed his newfound love-hatred with both barrels.
Meanwhile, we're off to copyright our idea for a reality TV show in which furious contestants beg for revenge upon their gremlin-possessed appliances, while viewers vote for which one gets hurled from a four-story balcony, or "wasted" with a sawn-off.
The California Supreme Court's decision to allow same-sex marriage was greeted with both joy, and indifference. Joy from the gay community, where some couples had waited over quarter of a century to officially affirm their bonds. And indifference from much of the rest of California, including the anti-gay-marriage lobby.
But, is there any science that can help shed light on gay marriage? We are wary that past scientific 'contributions' have added at least as much heat as light to the debate. Now, lets provide new insights into the brain mechanisms that support same-sex relationships.
Much of the anti-gay-marriage argument rests on two commonly held assumptions: Life-long exclusive mate-bonding for purposes of rearing joint offspring is natural, and homosexuality is unnatural.
Both assumptions have little basis in fact.
Homosexual acts have, in fact, now been widely documented across a range of mammal species (that's right -- we're 'outing' mammals!), including our closest relatives, apes and monkeys.
Research published this week in the journal Public Library of Science ONE showed that one reason that male homosexuality has survived (even though gay men produce fewer offspring than straight men) that the 'gay gene' must be somehow beneficial to women, or it would have been eliminated from the gene pool.
Meanwhile, there seems to be nothing particularly 'natural' about marriage. Only about 3% of mammal species are monogamous -- meaning they cohabitate -- and few of these species mate for life. And nearly each partner in these 'animal marriages' engage in extra-pair mating. Lifelong sexual loyalty in nature is, it turns out, a vanishingly rare commodity.
It turns out that both marriage and homosexuality are, in fact, both common for our species. As research at Center for Neuroeconomics Studies in California has shown, human attachment behaviors depend on the same 'bonding' molecule called oxytocin, also found in other mammals. When the human brain releases oxytocin, we immediately begin to care about those around us: family, friends, and even complete strangers. This effect is so unfocused, that we also care about nonhumans, too, including dogs, cats or stranded whales. We name our cars, and cry when we sell our houses.
Oxytocin is also the basis for virtuous behaviors towards strangers. Researchers in my lab have shown that in humans, oxytocin promotes trustworthiness, generosity, and empathy. These virtues make the free societies we live in possible -- without oxytocin we would need Big Brother monitoring every human interaction to eliminate crime, cruelty, and selfishness.
Because the oxytocin attachment system is a blunt instrument, it is not surprising that we see long-term same-sex partners. Our highly evolved, inherently flexible, human attachment system allows us to have a morality -- a love beyond the self -- that far exceeds anything found in our mammal relatives. So, long-term attachment between genders and within a gender should be viewed as natural as the care and affection we quite easily show to those around us.
Paul J. Zak is Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, CA. His new book is Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy, published by Princeton University Press. Ken Grimes is a writer based in London, UK.
There is an enormous amount of trust we show to strangers without even paying attention to it: the pilot flying your airplane, the chef preparing your dinner, or the taxi driver taking you across town. We often trust strangers with our lives, blind to their identities or intentions. We do this because most of the time it works out just fine. I experienced an extreme form of stranger-trust when I went to dinner with friends at a trendy "dine in the dark" restaurant in Los Angeles. These restaurants, first started in Zurich, Switzerland by blind clergyman J 
Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, is best known for the idea in his 1776 The Wealth of Nations that self-interested behavior leads to the best outcome for society as if through the working of an invisible hand. But Smith was an intellectual rock star before The Wealth of Nations. His 1759 book The Theory of Moral Sentiments catapulted him to fame by presenting what philosophers and theologians had always wanted: An explanation of good and evil.
Several years ago I stopped the execution of Teddy by adopting him. Sorry, "put down" is the polite euphemism. Today, Teddy is 98 in human-equivalent years. Inevitably, I will soon have to decide if I should spend thousands of dollars to extend Teddy's life when he undoubtedly begins to suffer from cancer, kidney failure, or some other ghastly malady. In public lectures, I have often asked who would spend $5,000 to save their dog's life. Typically, one-half of the hands go up. When I ask who would spend $10,000, many hands remain up. Why do we care so much about our dogs?