I took my troubles down to Madame Rue,
You know that gypsy with the gold-capped tooth.
She's got a pad down on Thirty-Fourth and Vine
Selling little bottles of Love Potion Number Nine.
I told her that I was a flop with chicks.
I've been this way since 1956.
She looked at my palm, and she made a magic sign.
She said "What you need is Love Potion Number Nine"
She bent down and turned around and gave me a wink.
She said "I'm gonna make it up right here in the sink."
It smelled like turpentine; it looked like Indian ink.
I held my nose, I closed my eyes, I took a drink.
I didn't know if it was day or night.
I started kissing everything in sight.
But when I kissed a cop down on Thirty-Fourth and Vine
He broke my little bottle of Love Potion Number Nine.
- Love Potion Number Nine by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller (1959)
Of great contemporary interest to the scientific community as well as the general public is the neuropeptide oxytocin. Nicknamed the cuddle hormone, liquid trust, and the love potion, oxytocin has been linked in a variety of studies to positive social relationships. In particular, higher levels of oxytocin are associated with greater trust and generosity.
Oxytocin is therefore good, right? Maybe not. Given its putative effects on our social behavior, it may be misused. Suppose unscrupulous car dealers wafted it through their showrooms? Suppose it were used by terrorists as the ultimate biological weapon to turn entire populations into unsuspecting fools? Suppose politicians surreptitiously distributed it to voters? Suppose oxytocin becomes a date-rape drug?
Indeed, here and there on the Internet are reports of oxytocin parties, where everyone imbibes and then lets nature take its course. These may be urban legends, but regardless, they give us pause.
Does oxytocin make us trust everyone, rendering us not only kind but stupid? Before we get too carried away, a look at the actual data is always a good idea. Oxytocin studies often rely on laboratory experiments, exposing participants to the hormone via an inhaler and measuring how they interact with someone else compared to participants receiving a placebo. Trust usually increases, often robustly, but these studies typically employ a one-shot only procedure. That is, a participant has no history of interacting with the other person in the experiment.
A recent study by Moïra Mikolajczak and colleagues (2010) is therefore important, because it required participants to interact over time with several other people, some of whom were more reliable than others. The results provide an important qualification about the effects of oxytocin. Overall, inhalation of oxytocin increased trust (gauged by a participant's willingness to transfer money to another person to invest), but this effect occurred only when the other person had a history of being reliable.
So, oxytocin increases trust but not gullibility. Or as Rabbi Julius Gordon wrote: "Love is not blind - it sees more, not less; but because it sees more, it is willing to see less.
Reference
Mikolajczak, M., Gross, J. J., Lane, A., Corneille, O., de Timary, P., & Luminet, O. (2010). Oxytocin makes people trusting, not gullible. Psychological Science.
