The hormone that makes us good or evil
September 6, 2012
Oliver Burkeman
The American academic Paul Zak is renowned among his colleagues for two things he does to people disconcertingly soon after meeting them. The first is hugging: seeing me approach across the library of his club, in midtown Manhattan, he springs to his feet, ignoring my outstretched hand, and enfolds me in his arms. The second is sticking needles in their arms to draw blood.
That all these people submit so willingly to his needle may have something to do with the fact that he is charm personified. A square-jawed, 50-year-old Californian with good hair, a sunny disposition and a media-friendly nickname (''Dr Love''), Zak gives every impression of having been constructed in a laboratory charged with creating the ideal author of a new buzz book - The Moral Molecule.
What drives Zak's hunger for human blood is his interest in the hormone oxytocin, about which he has become one of the world's most prominent experts. Oxytocin, long known as a female reproductive hormone - it plays a central role in childbirth and breastfeeding - emerges from Zak's research as something much more all-embracing: the ''moral molecule'' behind all human virtue, trust, affection and love, ''a social glue'', as he puts it, ''that keeps society together''. The subtitle of his book, ''The new science of what makes us good or evil'', gives a sense of the scale of his ambition, which involves nothing less than explaining whole swaths of philosophical and religious questions by reference to a single chemical in the bloodstream.
Being treated decently, it turns out, causes people's oxytocin levels to rise, which in turn prompts them to behave more decently, while experimental subjects given an artificial oxytocin boost - by means of an inhaler - behave more generously and trustingly. And it's not solely because of its effects on humans that oxytocin is known as ''the cuddle hormone'': for example, male meadow voles, normally roguishly promiscuous in their interactions with female meadow voles, become passionately monogamous when their oxytocin levels are raised in the lab.
These findings have striking implications for how we think about morality. Economists tend to pride themselves on being hardheaded realists: morality might be a nice set of ideas about how people ought to behave, this way of thinking goes, but economics is the analysis of how they really behave, motivated not by stirring ethical values but by the desire for personal gain. Perhaps ironically, religions tend to share a similar view: that moral conduct doesn't come naturally but instead needs to be imposed through fear or the promise of reward. Zak himself was raised in a staunch Catholic household: his mother, he likes to say, took him out of Catholic school because it wasn't strict enough and ''based her child-rearing on the assumption that unselfish, moral behaviour was impossible without the ever-present threat of punishment, the more terrifying the better''. Yet the fact that natural selection has given us oxytocin - a mechanism that allows us to be instinctively trusting and kind - suggests that what most of us think of as ''moral'' is, in fact, part of how we have evolved to be.
This talk of mixing science and morality prompts suspicion in some quarters: just because something is ''natural'' doesn't mean it is ''right'', in an ethical sense, and efforts to derive codes of moral conduct from science rarely end well. Moreover, it is unclear what Zak means when he says oxytocin, or the lack of it, ''makes'' us good or evil. This is the same problem as with news reports about scientists discovering the part of the brain ''responsible for'' risk-taking, or greed, or a belief in God: just because you have found the biological underpinnings of some phenomenon, it does not necessarily follow that you have found ''the real cause'' of it. Still, none of that undermines the most potent aspect of Zak's work, which is the pragmatic one. If oxytocin is the mechanism through which moral action takes place, that holds out the possibility - a cause of either optimism or alarm, depending on how you look at it - that by manipulating oxytocin we might boost the levels of trust, generosity and ultimately happiness in ourselves and the world at large.
Obviously he doesn't read much Twitter or visit many forums.Interactions on Twitter and Facebook seem to lead to oxytocin surges, offering a powerful retort to the argument that social media is killing real human interaction: in hormonal terms, it appears, the body processes it as an entirely real kind of interaction.
Guardian News & Media
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