Trust morality and oxytocin Paul Zak

do anything unique about human beings

there is were the only creatures with

fully developed Moral Sentiments we’re

obsessed with morality of social

creatures we need to know why people are

doing what they’re doing and I

personally am obsessed with morality

it’s all due to this woman sister Mary

Maris Stella also known as my mom as an

altar boy I breathe in a lot of incense

and I learned to say phrases in Latin

but I also had time to think about

whether my mother’s top-down morality

apply to everybody I saw that people who

were religious and non-religious were

equally obsessed with morality I thought

maybe there’s an earthly basis for moral

decisions but I wanted to go further

than to say our brains make us moral I

want to know if there’s a chemistry of

morality I want to know if there was a

moral molecule after 10 years of

experiments I found it oh would you like

to see it I brought some with me this

little syringe contains the moral

molecule

it’s called oxytocin so oxytocin is a

simple an ancient molecule found only in

mammals in rodents it was known to make

mother’s care for their offspring and in

some creatures allowed for toleration of

burrow mates but in humans was only

known to facilitate birth and

breastfeeding in women as released by

both sexes during sex so I had this idea

that oxytocin might be the moral

molecule I did what most of us do I

tried it on some colleagues one of them

told me Paul that is the world’s

stupidest idea it is he said only a

female molecule can’t be that important

but I countered will men’s brains make

this - there must be a reason why but he

was right it was a stupid idea but it

was testily stupid in other words I

thought I could design an experiment to

see if oxytocin made people moral turns

out it wasn’t so easy

first of all oxytocin is a shy molecule

baseline levels are near zero without

some stimulus to cause its release and

when it’s produced has a three-minute

half-life and degrades rapidly room

temperature so this experiment will have

to cause a surge of oxytocin have to

grab it fast and keep it cold I think I

can do that now luckily oxytocin has

produced both in the brain and in the

blood so I could do this experiment

without learning neurosurgery then I had

to measure morality so taking on

morality with a capital M is a huge

project so I started smaller diet study

one single virtue trustworthiness why

I’d show in the early 2000s that

countries with a higher proportion of

trustworthy people are more prosperous

so in these countries more economic

transactions occur and more wealth is

created alleviating poverty so poor

countries are by and large low trust

countries so if I understood the

chemistry of trustworthiness I might

help alleviate poverty or am also a

skeptic I don’t want to just ask people

are you trustworthy so instead I use the

Jerry Maguire approach to research if

you’re so virtuous

show me the money so what we do in my

lab which we tempt people with the

virtue advice by using money let me show

you how we do that

so recruit some people for an experiment

they’ll get $10 they agreed to show up

they will give them lots of instruction

and we never ever deceive them then we

match them in pairs my computer and in

that pair one person gets the matches

saying do you want to give up some of

your 10 dollars you earn for being here

and ship it to someone else in the lab

with a trick is you can’t see them you

can’t talk to them you only do it one

time now whatever you give up gets

tripled and the other person’s account

gonna make them a lot wealthier and they

get a message by computer saying person

1 sent you this amount of money do you

want to keep it all or do you want to

send some amount back okay so think

about this experiment for a minute you

know Sydney’s hard chairs for an hour

and a half some mad scientist says to

jab your arm with a needle and take four

tubes of blood and now you want me to

give up this money and ship it to a

stranger so this was the birth of

vampire economics make a decision give

me some blood so in fact extremal

economists had run this task around the

world and from much higher stakes and

the consensus view was that the transfer

from the first person to the second was

a measure of trust and the transfer from

the second person back to the first

measured trustworthiness when in fact

economists were flummoxed on why the

second person would ever return any

money they assumed money is good why not

keep it all that’s not what we found we

found 90% of the first decision-makers

sent money and if those who received

money 95 percent returned some of it but

why well by measuring oxytocin we found

that the more money a second person

received the more their brain produced

oxytocin and the more oxytocin on board

the more money they returned so we have

a biology of trustworthiness but wait

what’s wrong with this experiment two

things one is that nothing in the body

happens in isolation so he measured nine

other molecules that interact with

oxytocin may they have any effect but

this

it is that I still only had this

indirect relationship reading oxytocin

and trustworthiness I didn’t know for

sure oxytocin caused trustworthiness

so for mating experiment I know I’d have

to go into the brain and manipulate

oxytocin directly I used everything

short of a drill to get oxytocin into my

own brain and I found I could do it with

a nasal inhaler so along with colleagues

in Zurich we put two hundred men in

Washington or placebo had them do that

same trust task with money we found that

those mosquitos mentally showed more

trust we can more than double the number

of people who sent all their money to a

stranger all without altering mood or

cognition so oxytocin is the trust

molecule but is it the moral molecule

using that stoves inhaler we ran more

studies we showed that oxytocin infusion

increases generosity in unilateral

monetary transfers by eighty percent we

showed it increases donation to charity

by 50 percent I’ve also investigated

nonpharmacologic ways to raise oxytocin

these include massage dancing and

praying yes my mom was happy about that

last one and whenever we raise oxytocin

people willingly open up their wallets

and share money with strangers but why

did they do this what does it feel like

when your brain is flooded with oxytocin

to investigate this question we went an

experiment where we had people watch a

video of a father and his four-year-old

son and the son has terminal brain

cancer after they watched the video we

had them rate their feelings and took

blood before and after to measure

oxytocin the change in oxytocin

predicted their feelings of empathy

so it’s empathy that makes us connect to

other people it’s empathy that makes us

help other people it’s empathy that

makes us moral now this idea is not new

a then-unknown philosopher named Adam

Smith wrote a book in 1759 called the

Theory of Moral Sentiments in this book

Smith argued that we are moral creatures

not because of

down reason but for a bottom-up reason

he said we’re social creatures so we

share the emotions of others so if I do

something that hurts you I feel that

pain so I tend to avoid that if I do

something that makes you happy I get to

share your joy so I tend to do those

things now this is the same Adam Smith

who’s 17 years later would write a

little book called The Wealth of Nations

the founding document of economics but

he was in fact a moral philosopher and

he was right on why we’re moral I just

found the molecule behind it but knowing

that molecule is valuable because it

tells us how to turn up this behavior

and what turns it off in particular

tells us why we see immorality so

investigate immorality let me bring you

back now to 1980 I’m working at a gas

station in the outskirts of Santa

Barbara California

you send a gas station all day you see

lots of morality and morality let me

tell you so one Sunday afternoon a man

walks into my cashiers booth with this

beautiful jewelry box opens it up

there’s a pearl necklace inside he said

hey I was in the men’s room I just found

this what do you think we should do with

it putting lost-and-found so this is

very valuable when we have to find the

owner for this so we’ll try to decide

what to do with this the phone rings and

a man says very excitedly I was in your

gas station while ago and I bought this

Dewar for my wife and I can’t find it I

said pearl necklace yeah hey I just

found it Oh saving my life here’s my

phone number

tell that guy to wait half an hour I’ll

be there and I’ll give him a $200 reward

great so tell the guy look relax get

yourself with that reward

life’s good I can’t do it I have this

job interview and Goleta in 15 minutes

and I need this job I gotta go again he

asked me what do you think we should do

I’m in high school I have no idea so I

said I’ll hold it for you said you know

you’ve been so nice that you put the

reward I’ll give you the jewelry you

give me a hundred dollars and when the

guy comes all right you see it I was

conned right this is a classic con

called the pigeon drop and I was the

pigeon so the way many cons work is not

that the con man gets the victim to

trust him

is that he shows he trusts the victim

now we know what happens the victims

brain releases oxytocin and you’re

opening up your wallet or purse and

giving away the money right so who are

these people who manipulate our oxytocin

systems we found testing thousands of

individuals that five percent of

population don’t release oxytocin on

stimulus so if you trust them their

brains don’t release oxytocin if there’s

money in the table they keep it all so

there’s a technical word for these

people in my lab we call them bastards

these are not people you want to have a

beer with they have many of the

attributes of psychopaths okay now there

are other ways the system can be

inhibited one is through improper

nurturing so we’ve studied sexually

abused women and about half those don’t

release oxytocin stimulus okay you need

enough nurturing for the system to

develop properly also high stress

inhibits oxytocin so we all know this

when we’re really stressed out we’re not

acting our best as another way oxytocin

is inhibited which is interesting

through the action of testosterone so

we’ve in experiments have administered

testosterone to men as to have sharing

money they become selfish okay but

interestingly high testosterone males

were also more likely to use their own

money to punish others for being selfish

now think about this it means within our

own biology we have the yin and yang of

morality

we have oxytocin that connects us to

others makes them makes us feel what

they feel and we have testosterone and

men have ten times the testosterone as

women so men do this more than women

we have testosterone that makes us want

to punish people who behave in morally

we don’t need God our government telling

what to do is all inside of us right so

you may be wondering oh these are

beautiful laboratory experiments do they

really apply to real life yeah I’ve been

worrying about that too so I’ve gone out

of the lab to see if this really holds

in our daily lives so last summer I

attended a wedding of southern England

200 people this beautiful Victorian

mansion

to a single person and I drove up in my

rented Vauxhall and I took out a

centrifuge and dry ice and needles and

tubes and I took blood from a bride and

the groom in the wedding party in the

family and the friends before and

immediately after the vows guess what

weddings caused the release of oxytocin

but they do so in a very particular way

who is the center of the wedding solar

system the bride she’d the biggest

increase in oxytocin who loves the

wedding almost as much as a bride her

mother that’s right

her mother was number two then the

groom’s father then the groom then the

family then the friends arrayed around

the bride like planets around the Sun so

I think it tells us that we’ve designed

this ritual to connect us to this new

couple connect us emotionally why

because we need them to be successful

reproducing to perpetuate the species

also worried that my tres experiments

with small amounts of money didn’t

really capture how often we actually

trust our lives to strangers so even

though I have a fear of heights

I recently strapped myself another human

being and stepped out of an airplane at

12,000 feet

I took my blood before and after and I

had a huge spike on oxytocin and there’s

so many ways we can connect to people

for example through social media many

people are tweeting right now

so we investigate all social media and

found that using social media produces

solid double-digit increases oxytocin so

I ran this experiment recently for the

Korean Broadcasting System and they had

the reporters and their producers

participate and one of these guys must

have been 22 had a hundred and fifty

percent spike in oxytocin

I mean astounding no one has this so he

was using social media in private when I

wrote my reports the Koreans I said look

I don’t know what this guy was doing but

my guess was interacting with his mother

or his girlfriend they checked he was

interacting on his girlfriend’s Facebook

page there you go that’s connection

alright so there’s tons of ways that we

can connect to other people and it seems

to be universal two weeks ago I just got

back from Papua New Guinea where I went

up to the Highlands very isolated tribes

of

subsistence farmers living as they have

lived for millennia there are 800

different languages in the highlands

these are the most primitive people in

the world and they indeed also release

oxytocin

okay so oxytocin connects us to other

people eisah Tosun makes us field other

people feel and it’s so easy to cause

people’s brains to release oxytocin I

know how to do it and my favorite way to

do it is in fact the easiest let me show

it to you give me a hug there you go

so my penchant for hugging other

people’s ermine they nicknamed dr. love

I’m happy to share a little more love in

the world it’s great but here’s your

prescription from dr. love eight hugs a

day we have found that people release

more oxytocin are happier and they’re

happier because they have better

relationships of all types dr. love says

eight hugs a day eight hugs and a you’ll

be happier and the world would be a

better place of course if you don’t like

to touch people

I can always shove this up your nose