Oxytocin, a hormonal drug advertised as an elixir of truth, has not shown in scientific research any properties that would allow conclusions to be drawn about its significant influence on the decision-making process in humans, New Scientist reported.
The portal refers to research by the team of Moira Mikolajczak from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. Mikolajczak, wanting to check the properties of oxytocin, found 60 male volunteers who were administered oxytocin or a placebo.
The volunteers then played a game where they could entrust the money to a trusted partner to triple it. The trusted partner could decide whether to give all or only part of the money. Reasons whether to consider partners in the game trustworthy or not provided by, among others their hobbies.
The results showed that oxytocin made more money transfers to trustworthy partners than they did in the placebo group. However, this did not happen if the partner was initially found to be untrustworthy.
There are companies on the Internet that sell oxytocin as a kind of elixir of truth. They say that oxytocin makes people completely naive + give it to a businessman and he will buy your product, pass it to a woman and he will fall in love with you +. Our research shows that it is quite the opposite – said New Scientist Mikolajczak.
This is the first human study to show that oxytocin has no effect in all situations, said New Scientist neuropsychologist Thomas Baumgartner of the University of Basel in Switzerland. As he added, the next issue is what is happening in the brain, that such processes take place in it – he added.