Speaking of Psychology - Molecules and morals: learning the link (SOP6)

Episode Date: February 3, 2014

Oxytocin has been called the “love hormone.” But recent research has shown that the brain chemical may play a role in regulating our moral behaviors. Researcher and author Paul Zak, PhD, discusses how his experiments and clinical studies have given us a glimpse into how oxytocin affects how we interact with one another, both face to face and online. APA is currently seeking proposals for APA 2020, click here to learn more https://convention.apa.org/proposals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oxytocin has been called the love hormone. But recent research has shown that the brain chemical may play a role in regulating our moral behaviors, earning itself another nickname, the moral molecule. In this episode, psychologist Paul Zach talks about his research into oxytocin's impact on how we interact with one another face-to-face and even virtually. I'm Andre Hamilton, and this is speaking of psychology. Paul Zach is the founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies and Professor of Economics, Psychology, and Management at Claremont Graduate University. He studies the brain chemical oxytocin and its impact on behaviors and personality.

His book, The Moral Molecule, The Source of Love and Prosperity, was published in 2012. Welcome, Dr. Zach. Thank you. Happy to be here. We want to know. What is oxytocin? Why do you call it the moral molecule? So oxytocin is a chemical the brain makes.

It functions both as a hormone, which means it affects parts of the body outside the brain, and in the brain it actually affects brain activity. And it was known only to be released in humans during birth and breastfeeding and during sex. But it turns out, in studies we started doing about a dozen years ago, that there are many other stimuli that cause the brain to release oxytocin. And when oxytocin is released, we connect to other people. We care about other people in tangible ways. So we've done experiments where we tempt people with virtue advice by putting money on the table.

And when people release oxytocin or when we give them synthetic oxytocin, they're much more likely to engage in positive social behaviors, what we would call moral behaviors, because of oxytocin. We've taken blood before and after, different social stimuli, positive social stimuli, like dancing, like singing, like sharing, people praying, meditating, all these things done in a group, release oxytocin, and subsequently follow the money. So see what people do with the money

once they've released oxytocin, and we see that we can actually turn on these positive social behaviors, more behaviors like opening a garden hose. So what tells us is that, first of all, oxytocin is a deep part of our human nature. It's what it means to be a human is to be a social creature. But to be social, we have to have some chemical,

some indicator in our brain that tells us this person is safe, this person is someone I can affiliate with, this is someone I should care about, and that's what oxytocin seems to do. So it works in conjunction with other neurochemicals that maintain a balance between trust and distrust or fear, safety, approach, withdrawal. Can you alter the level of oxytocin in your brain? Or is that only something you can do in the lab? Or can you do it at home?

No, we're doing it all the time. So a simple thing like hugging will raise oxytocin. So a number of years ago, I decided to not shake people's hands, but hug everybody. and people would connect better with me actually. And so... Surprisingly. Yeah, surprisingly. And so anything that really reaches out and connects you to other people will likely

raise oxytocin. We've done a lot of field studies, for example, in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, taking blood from people who live in the rainforest after they do a tribal dance, and the majority of those individuals release oxytocin. I've gone to weddings and taken blood from the bride and the groom in the wedding party, and that wedding ritual not only released oxytocin on average, but it does so in a very particular manner. You know, who's the center of the wedding and solar system?

The bride, of course, is the biggest increase in oxytocin. Who loves the wedding almost as much as the bride? Her mother, right? So she's number two. And so the release of oxytocin, the amount of release tells us about the strength of connections between individuals. So who are the best oxytocin relicers, little children, puppies, you know, people who need our support to survive.

But I think we all can actually release oxytocin in other. So we can't cause our own brain to release oxytocin in general. There's some exceptions, but we can give that gift to others. So I think one of the take-homes is, as a social creature, you need to reach out, connect to others, give them that gift of oxytocin release, and most likely 95% of the thousands of people we study, they will reciprocate. So the people who don't are essentially of two types. One is people who are super stressed out, they're having a bad day, they just don't have the brain activity

to actually release oxytocin. And the second is psychopaths. So a study of psychopaths shows that they don't really. this oxytocin, and they don't have the antecedent psychological effects of oxytocin release, which is that feeling of empathy. So that's classically missing in psychopaths. So when we connect to others, we better reflect their emotions, which helps us be better social creatures to understand how to interact with them.

And you're talking about things that are very much about face-to-face interactions. How have our brains adapted to more frequent interactions via social media and online networking? How is all this coming into play? That's a great question. So we've done a couple of small-scale studies. We came in, had people give us a sample of their blood, and then let them in private use social media of any type. Twitter, Facebook, emailing, and then took their blood 10 minutes later.

What we found was that in 100% of the people we've tested so far, social media use causes the brain release oxytocin. And, as I said earlier, the amount of oxygen release tells us about the strength of connection. So we did this recently for a Korean TV station, and we included one of their young producers in the sample. It must have been 22 or 23 years old. And when we got his results from his blood test back, he had 150% increase in oxytocin.

So I said, you know, I don't know what this guy was doing because he was using social media in private. My guess was he was interacting with his mother or his girlfriend because the connection was so powerful. They checked. He was posting to his girlfriend's Facebook page for 10 minutes. So again, think about this. chemical as giving us the ability to determine who we should invest our resources in, who we should

be vulnerable to, who we should trust who we want to be around. And that's very adaptive for social creatures. Now, another thing you found at the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies, and what is neuroeconomics? How does it help us learn about human behavior? Right. So I know that you have never made a bad decision in your life, but your brother-in-law who started buying investment real estate in 2007, when everyone knew the bubble was going to crash, what's the deal on that? So neuro-economic studies, brain activity while people make decisions. That's it. Many of those decisions have to do with decisions that may involve products or markets, but a lot of them don't. So much of our research has been on social decisions, so interact strongly

with areas in social psychology, as well as with solving problems. How do people actually solve problems as a group or as individuals, which interacts with cognitive psychology? So many of the studies we've done have a very strong psychological component to them because we not only want to understand the brain activity and the behavior, but what it feels like, what's the subjective experience of going through this? And so we use a lot of tools from psychology to really understand what human beings are doing. Well, great. Thank you so much, Dr. Zach, for being with us today. It was a pleasure. For more information on Dr. Zach's work, please visit our website at Speaking of Psychology.

With the American Psychological Association, speaking of psychology, I'm Audrey Hamilton.