Scientists make "trust potion"

<body leftmargin="0" bgcolor="#000060" text="#FFFFFF" link="#FFFF00" vlink="#FF9900"> <b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="5">Scientists make “trust potion”</font></p> </b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="1">June 1, 2005<br> Courtes Nature<br> and World Science staff<br> </font> <b><font size="2" face="Arial"><br> Imagine if you could bottle trust, ready to be unleashed the next time you want someone to lend you some money. Researchers say they have done just that, having developed a potion that, when sniffed, makes people more inclined to trust someone else to look after their cash.<br> <br> The key chemical is oxytocin, a hormone that is known to promote social interactions such as pair bonding in animals, say Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and his colleagues, who report the discovery in this week’s issue of the research journal <i>Nature</i>. <br> <br> They studied people playing a trust game in which an “investor” could choose how many credits to hand over to a “trustee,” who would then decide how much to hand back after the stake had been quadrupled in size.<br> <br> Investors were more trusting after inhaling oxytocin, the researchers found. Moreover, this effect was no longer seen when the trustee was replaced with a computer, showing that oxytocin functions to promote social interaction rather than simply making people more likely to take risks.</font> </b> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font size="2" face="Arial">Oxytocin has also been implicated as a hormone that promotes pair-bonding in animals, and possibly romantic love in humans.<br> <br> The trust potion finding “opens up possibilities for investigating conditions in which trust is either diminished, as in autism, or augmented,” wrote Antonio Damasio of the University of Iowa, Iowa City, in a commentary in the journal.</font> </p> </b> </body>