While oxytocin is a confidence-boosting hormone, it doesn’t make people credulous, reports New Scientist.
Oxytocin is a hormone produced in the brain by the hypothalamus and released by the posterior pituitary gland. It is secreted during labor, orgasm and breastfeeding – so oxytocin is given for some difficult births. It is related to the maternal instinct (the higher the level of oxytocin in the first three months of pregnancy, the stronger the relationship between the mother and the child is), as well as the mate selection mechanism. There are also studies showing that it makes people more trusting.
In 2005, the Swiss subjected a group of experiment participants to a spray containing oxytocin. Under her influence, people participating in the economic game invested more confidently – as many as 45 percent of them showed maximum trust in the trustee. There were then concerns that the sprayed oxytocin could be used by politicians to gain voters’ confidence, and on the Internet – shady oxytocin sellers, touting it as an elixir of love and business success, to be administered to targeted people.
Now the team of Moira Mikolajczak from the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium) conducted a study on a group of 60 men who were given either oxytocin or a placebo. Volunteers played a game where they could entrust money to a trusted partner in whose hands they could triple. The partner could have given all or part of the money. Participants were described partners (for example, their hobbies) in such a way as to make them appear credible or unreliable.
As it turned out, people given oxytocin gave more money to reliable partners than the placebo group, but did not entrust large sums to unreliable people. Therefore, it seems that oxytocin will not make a career either in the world of politics or among crooks and seducers.
A very unusual use of oxytocin was found in 2009 by Indian farmers from the states of Uttar Pradesh and Punjab – they injected the hormone into melons, cucumbers and pumpkins to make them grow larger. Although it is not a plant hormone, oxytocin has a marked effect on vegetables and fruits, increasing their size and weight – but it is not known what the mechanism of this is (PAP).