The Moral Molecule Under The Microscope #3: On The Relation Of Oxytocin And Pro-Social Behavior

In the last edition of "The Moral Molecule Under The Microscope" I talked about how traditional game theory (based on the economic perspective of human behavior) fails to model actual human behavior. Specifically, trust and trustworthiness found in experiments challenge the notion of self-interest embedded in older economic perspectives of human behavior as well as in traditional game theory. There are a a lot of variables that are missing in the models created based on these older ideas. Some of those variables are emotions or personalities. Furthermore, I showed how in Zak's experiments people display trust and cooperation even when paired with complete strangers. These behaviors cannot be explained by traditional game theory. In an attempt to explain what was causing this behavior, Zak expanded on his previous experiment.

The design of the experiment was pretty much the same. To know what experiment I am talking about and its specific design, please check my last post of The Moral Molecule Under The Microscope. Only this time, he took blood samples of participants at several stages of the experiment. For example, once a person sent an amount of money or once a person received an amount of money, he took blood samples. If you remember the first post of this series, we talked about how witnessing an act of trust makes the witness release oxytocin which in turn make him behave more pro-socially. In his experiment, Zak was interested in studying when and by how much would oxytocin levels vary. The interesting analyzes would not come from the person sending money at first, but from the person receiving the money. If Zak's theory was right, the person receiving the money would release oxytocin and have a more pro-social response afterwards.

As expected, Zak and his team found a dramatic and direct correlation between a person's level of oxytocin and his willingness to respond to a sign of trust by giving back money. To make sure that it was oxytocin and nothing else the cause of this behavior, Zak ran more analyzes. From the blood samples, not only oxytocin levels were measured, but also the levels of nine other hormones. These included testosterone, estradiol, and progesterone among others. Furthermore, he tried to correlate the results with answers from the personality survey such as "How much do you drink?" or "How often do you go to church?". In the end, he found not significant link between the any of these factors and the reciprocal generosity he was witnessing. The only one significantly correlating was the level of oxytocin in a person.

Zak yet had to test something else. He had proven that the more oxytocin they release, the more pro-socially they behave. But what made them release oxytocin in the first place? He had theorized that witnessing an act of trust makes people release oxytocin, but it was time to prove it scientifically. To do this, he added a control group to the experiment. For this control group instead of the person taking the decisions, a machine would do it in a random fashion. In the normal scenario, person A would decide what fraction of his money he wanted to send to person B. Person B would receive three times the amount person A sent. Finally, person B would decide how much he wanted to send back, i.e. reciprocate. In this case though, a machine would take the decision for person A and would do it randomly.

The results showed that participants who received money based on someone else's decision had oxytocin levels that were 50% higher than the participants who received money based on a random algorithm. Also, participants who received money based on someone else's decision returned on average 41% of their new total, compared to the mere 21% that participants returned if their luck was random. These results show that not only they are correlated, but also that oxytocin is directly correlated to pro-social behavior. Meaning that the more oxytocin you have in your system, the more pro-socially you are going to behave. Furthermore, Zak took a step further into proving the causality of the release of oxytocin and on the effect of oxytocin in behavior.

"If you do good things, good things will happen to you" might not be that far off. The knowledge hidden in culture and traditional sayings always surprises me. What do you think? I'd like to hear your opinions.

If you want to check out other thoughts that this awesome book has evoked, click on these past posts:

• The Moral Molecule Under The Microscope #1: Witnessing An Act Of Trust Makes You Behave More Pro-Socially
• The Moral Molecule Under The Microscope #2: On An Erroneous And Antiquated Economic View Of Human Behavior

Best,

@capatazche