The Dark Side of Oxytocin

Research shows the brain chemical known to create bonding also produces hostility of the “other”

By Sofia Deleniv

What would you do if you saw a billboard ad for a nasal spray claiming it could make you a more moral person? Would you buy it? Even if you wouldn’t, do you think society as a whole might benefit from a morality potion, strategically dripped into a politician’s coffee or vaporized into the air at the next charity fundraiser? Then again, it’s all just hypothetical, right?

Not entirely.

Researchers in the field of morality have spent several years examining a substance that is already freely available on the worldwide pharmaceutical market. The synthetic version of the neuropeptide oxytocin, sold under trademarked names such as Syntocinon and Pitocin, is commonly used to induce uterine contractions during childbirth and occasionally stimulate breast-milk production in recent mothers. Across most mammalian species, elevated levels of oxytocin in the nervous system and bloodstream contribute to the development of parental behaviors, ranging from changes in feeding and nurturing habits to bonding and protectiveness.

More recently, lab experiments have investigated the possibility that nasal sprays containing synthetic oxytocin could harness this neurochemical system to make humans more apt to be social. The controversial findings have given rise to hype hailing oxytocin as the “moral molecule” that underpins our biological capacity to be generous, dependable, and fair. This potential for a new use of an old drug raises questions about whether we could and should use bioenhancement — or should I say neuroenhancement? — to refine our imperfect human nature, a possibility that we need to treat with caution.

Let’s begin by looking at the science.

In 2005 American neuroeconomist Paul Zak and his colleagues examined the effects of oxytocin spray on trust and dependability in a financial cooperation game. One participant was given the role of investor while the other was assigned to be the trustee. The investor was asked to choose an amount of money to give to the trustee, knowing that the trustee would automatically receive 300 percent of the invested amount and would get to decide whether to return a portion of that money to the investor. Assuming the trustee is dependable and returns some of the earnings to the investor, the situation could be mutually beneficial. But given that the trustee has an obvious incentive to rip off the investor and keep the money, the arrangement is also risky. Using this paradigm, the researchers measured the amounts of money that experimental investors were willing to risk as an index of how strongly they trusted their co-players to reciprocate.

Would we be truly moral if that morality was artificially produced rather than created through a conscious, disciplined shift in thinking and behavior?

The researchers found that individuals given single doses of the oxytocin nasal spray entrusted their fellow players with significantly greater amounts of money than those who got a whiff of a placebo. What’s more, researchers analyzing the blood oxytocin levels of trustees who were notified of an investment found that receiving this trust signal from their co-player triggered a spike in oxytocin levels that correlated with how much money the trustee then chose to return to the investor. The bottom line of these experiments was that increasing our brains’ oxytocin levels might make us not only more trusting but also more generous and less inclined to take advantage of others’ trust, even when we incur a personal cost.

Since then, numerous studies have reported oxytocin’s positive effects on social behaviors, such as compassion and the ability to read emotional facial expressions. Eventually, Zak, the researcher behind the earliest reports of oxytocin’s effects on trust, went on to give a TED talk and publish a controversial book claiming that oxytocin is “the chemical elixir that creates bonds of trust not just in our intimate relationships but also in our business dealings, in politics, and in society at large.”

It’s tempting to imagine that we have uncovered the biological key to making us more attuned to those around us, and perhaps altogether better human beings. Should we use it? Some companies have already answered that question for you. I’m not joking when I tell you that you can now buy on Amazon a body spray containing oxytocin called “Liquid Trust” that supposedly can reshape your personal and work relationships for just $29.95!

The Swedish and Australian philosophers Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu have gone as far as to suggest that the self-destructive nature of humanity makes it unlikely that we would ever be able to solve our own problems (e.g., terrorism, pollution, racism, weapons of mass destruction) through education and political reform. Instead, they say, the situation calls for a populationwide bioenhancement intervention to bring out our altruistic tendencies. Among the methods they proposed was tinkering with our neurochemistry, such as using drugs that target the oxytocin system. The buzz around the moral potential of a single neuropeptide has been so blown out of proportion that some researchers have jokingly said “a sniff of this substance might be sufficient to restore love, understanding, and peace in the world.”

Why the skepticism? The short answer is that oxytocin evolved long before Socrates’ musings on moral values (it existed in most vertebrates), and as such its purpose has never been to produce behaviors that abide by our philosophical definitions of morality. In light of this, we need to question the biological reality of a moral molecule. If not, we risk embarking on the 21stcentury flight of Icarus, flying too close to an ideal that might end up burning our wings.

Many studies that have failed to replicate the pro-social oxytocin effects never surface in scientific journals and the media (partly because the publishing world tends to be less excited about negative findings). Also, and of greater concern, other findings indicate that oxytocin may have a dark side.

Oxytocin Knife/ ILLUSTRATION BY KIERSTEN ESSENPREIS

Many animals, including humans, evolved in a world defined by social groups in which trust and altruism play a fundamental role in sustaining and strengthening one’s own kin in the face of competition from outside groups. Darwin pointed this out in his book “The Descent of Man,” hypothesizing that “groups with a greater number of courageous, sympathetic, and faithful members, who were always ready to…aid and defend each other…would spread and be victorious over other tribes.” It’s plausible the biological systems that regulate our moral behaviors, including oxytocin-signalling in the brain, may not have evolved to extend our care to everyone equally.

Indeed, across most mammalian species, increased oxytocin levels are known to provoke territoriality and hostility toward intruders. Humans are generally no different. When researchers began dividing their participants into groups, they quickly observed behaviors that cast a shadow on the reported morality-enhancing effects of oxytocin. The neurochemical appears to sharpen the contrast between how we treat our fellow group members and individuals from other groups that can be defined by a wide range of characteristics such as race and religion. I don’t need to tell you that in today’s multicultural society this effect is bad news.

One of the first pieces of evidence that oxytocin promotes ethnocentrism came from a study by Carsten De Dreu’s research team in Amsterdam that examined the way indigenous Dutch men treated one another in comparison with people of other nationalities. Participants were asked to solve a series of moral dilemmas, such as the famous trolley problem in which they decide whether they would redirect a trolley headed toward five railway workers to a track where it would instead kill only one person. The one person that would be sacrificed either had a typically Dutch name, like Dirk, or a name of a member from another group, such as the Arabic Youssef or the German Helmut. Under normal conditions, Dutch men were just as likely to sacrifice a man from their home country as a man whose name suggested he was a foreigner. But a dose of oxytocin made them significantly less likely to sacrifice a Dutchman for the sake of saving five people, without changing how often they were willing to sacrifice a member of another group. That’s right, more men would have chosen to save one Dutch man rather than saving five people from an outside group.

Since 1967, ethicists have proposed five versions of the “trolley problem.”/ Courtesy of Jonas Kubilius via Wiki Commons

In a further study conducted by the same researchers, participants under the influence of oxytocin turned out to be more likely to make financial decisions that benefited members of their experimental group than themselves. In the words of the authors behind these publications, oxytocin appears to enhance love for one’s own group, which gives rise to the phenomenon of “parochial altruism” — generous behavior that privileges members of one’s own clan.

I think you’ve read enough to have a hunch that oxytocin’s moral reputation likely disguises some great caveats, as the resulting boost in group favoritism is likely to make humans more prone to ethnic bias. These behaviors don’t necessarily amount to classic racism, whereby people have preconceptions that some humans have greater value than others. Rather, oxytocin’s effects resonate more with the contemporary issue of racism as an institutionalized system in which members of a particular race privilege each other, thereby widening the gap between the living conditions and opportunities they have in comparison with other groups of people.

Now let’s reconsider the suggestion that moral bioenhancement is needed because humans are too flawed to resolve issues without a little help. This idea has raised considerable debate in the field of bioethics, but that belies a paradox that seems to be weaved into the very fabric of the argument. That is, there appears to be an implicit assumption that our neurobiology somehow transcends our imperfect humanity, and if only we could tap into its reserve, then we could produce morality that humans are otherwise unlikely to produce through effort.

From my standpoint, it makes little sense to expect that we could surpass ourselves by harnessing the very biological systems that have evolved to produce our flawed tendencies. Where could this bring us? Certainly with respect to one of our prime moral candidates, oxytocin, the evidence warns us against assuming that we can manipulate our biology to produce true and unconditional morality.

For argument’s sake, though, say we did uncover a substance that appeared to conjure moral behaviors, untainted by our imperfect biases. Would we be truly moral if that morality was artificially produced rather than created through a conscious, disciplined shift in thinking and behavior? According to the 18thcentury philosopher Immanuel Kant, a good outcome doesn’t necessarily qualify an action as moral. Instead, true goodness is rooted in an agent’s intention to act in accordance with perceived moral obligations. With this in mind, does toying with the idea of moral bioenhancement imply that we are keen to give away our agency, which is so intuitively important for considering our achievement of morality truly our own? Are we genuinely trying to be better if we just spray the improvement up our noses? On the contrary, argues Harvard-based philosopher Michael Sandel. He has said that our quest for bioenhancement might be a form of hyperagency — our willingness to exert an effort entering the biotech age. After all, we clearly want to get rid of our shortcomings. In the case of morality, perhaps we’re just afraid we can’t achieve it through effort alone.

In response to this fear, let’s not forget that the Dutch men who were asked to solve the trolley dilemma without the influence of oxytocin were equally likely to sacrifice a fellow Dutchman as a foreigner. Humans are capable of engaging in moral decision-making that isn’t constrained by group membership. So while oxytocin itself cannot produce morality as we see it, the entire human brain clearly can. At least for now, perhaps our quest for morality shouldn’t lie in the hands of a single neurochemical.

Sofia Deleniv is currently pursuing a PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Oxford in the UK, where she researches mouse brain physiology. Driven by a slight frustration with the superficial manner in which the media reports scientific findings, she decided to start The Neurosphere blog in 2015. Follow her on Twitter.

Kiersten Essenpreis is a Chicago-based illustrator and gallery artist. She has shown her work in galleries across the U.S. and the globe including New York, Los Angeles, London, and Tokyo. Her illustrations have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Spin, and Nylon, among others.