The Trust Hormone

Sydney’s Guastella says it is also important to understand whether or not oxytocin increases pleasure or feelings of reward from social interactions. He says that for oxytocin to effectively treat social disorders, it will have to increase the person’s desire to interact with others, not just increase their likelihood to trust.

So far, giving people extra oxytocin has not produced any harmful side effects, but this needs to be researched better before being used as treatment.

***

Still, researchers are taking oxytocin seriously, and not just as a potential clinical treatment. They also acknowledge that its ability to shape behavior raises certain ethical questions. “You can imagine a wide range of scenarios,” Stoop says. He points to politicians potentially using oxytocin to gain voters’ trust or executives who might use it to garner trust in a business deal.

“The danger would be if you could administer oxytocin in a way that someone would not realize it,” Heinrichs says. But, he says, that would be difficult to do since oxytocin has to be administered through a nasal spray to be effective.

However, the Florida-based company Verolabs is already marketing a “liquid trust” perfume. Company officials would not return phone calls, but their website boasts that the perfume will help wearers gain the trust of others in both their professional and romantic lives.

Heinrichs and others dismiss this idea, saying that aerosolized oxytocin would not affect the brain because it quickly degrades. Oxytocin in a perfume spray would diffuse rapidly in the air and it wouldn’t reach the brain in high enough concentrations to have any effect, researchers say. Companies are just looking to make a quick buck, Heinrichs says. Even so, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wolpe still has concerns. “It does raise a number of questions on how it is we form relationships with other people and why some people are more trusting and others are more suspicious and wary,” he says.

But, he also points out that the effects shown in the Swiss study were relatively mild. Oxytocin didn’t cause a dramatic change in behavior, so it would be premature to jump to conclusions on how it could be used, he says. “This isn’t a magic bullet to put something over on someone,” he says.

It is important to figure out the context in which oxytocin could or should be used, says Eric Racine, director of the neuroethics research unit at the Institute of Clinical Research in Montreal. “This study really reflects the exciting advances that have been made in neuroscience, but also the potential ethical implications of knowing how we think, feel and behave,” says Racine. While other fields of science such as genetics and stem cell research have long spurred ethical debates, advances in neuroscience are just starting to raise similar ethical questions, Racine says. Just because we can shape behavior and feelings, he adds, doesn’t mean we should.

Also on Scienceline:

Oxytocin helps explain why men get sleepy after sex.

Fruit flies may provide insight into how we make decisions.

Hormones could one day provide relief to stroke victims.