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Scientists make “trust potion”
June 1, 2005
Courtesy Nature
and World Science staff
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.
The key chemical is oxytocin, a hormone that is known to promote social interactions such as pair bonding in animals,
said Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and his colleagues, who reported the
finding in this week’s issue of the research journal
Nature.
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.
Investors were more trusting after inhaling oxytocin, the researchers found. Moreover,
they added, this effect was no longer seen when the trustee was replaced with a computer,
suggesting oxytocin functions to promote social interaction rather than simply making people more likely to take risks.
Oxytocin is also believed to
be a hormone that may underlie romantic love.
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.
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Front photo courtesy State of
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