[shpritz!] Trust me!

Hormone Spray Is Found To Bolster Trust in Others By Shankar Vedantam

Scientists have found the chemical equivalent of the perfect sales pitch: a hormone that makes us more trusting than we normally are...

The experiment has profound implications about the nature of human trust.

I'll say!

Researchers said their finding might lead to cures for people with disorders that prompt them to hold others at arm's length, but they acknowledged that the chemical, which is widely used in medicine, could be misused.

Ya think?

Trust is central to virtually every positive social relationship, from intimate love and friendships to financial transactions and politics, but little had been learned about its biological correlates in the brain, researchers said. Oxytocin is known to be activated in a range of social relationships in many animals, but this is the first time scientists have shown that it can serve as a switch to enhance trust in human relationships...

"Some may worry about the prospect that political operators will generously spray the crowd with oxytocin at rallies of their candidates," said neurologist Antonio R. Damasio of the University of Iowa, who has long studied the neurobiology of human emotions and who wrote a commentary accompanying the study.

At the same time, he added in an interview, politicians and marketers were probably already triggering the natural release of oxytocin in the brains of audiences through their campaigns. "I am more alarmed about the manipulations of marketing than the possibility of oxytocin sprays," he said.

Easy for him to say. Admittedly the results are preliminary, but this guy looks like he absolutely refuses to believe it.

Brent Waters, an associate professor of Christian social ethics at the seminary, which is affiliated with Northwestern University, questioned whether trust could be so easily reduced to chemical constructs. "The experiment presupposes a highly diminished and reductionistic understanding of what trust means," he said.