Trust, morality -- and oxytocin? - Paul Zak

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Is there anything unique about human beings? There is. We're the only creatures with fully developed moral sentiments. We're obsessed with morality. As social creatures, we need to know why people are doing what they're doing. I personally am obsessed with morality. It's all due to this woman, Sister Mary Maristella, also known as my mom. As an altar boy, I breathed in a lot of incense and I learned to say phrases in Latin. But I also had time to think about whether my mother's top-down morality applied to everybody.

I saw that people who were religious and non-religious were equally obsessed with morality. I thought maybe there's an earthly basis for moral decisions. But I wanted to go further than to say our brains make us moral. I wanted to know if there's a chemistry of morality. I want to know if there was a moral molecule. After 10 years of experiments, I found it!

Oh, would you like to see it? I brought some with me! This little syringe contains the moral molecule. It's called oxytocin. So, oxytocin is a simple and ancient molecule found only in mammals. In rodents, it was known to make mothers care for their offspring and, in some creatures, allowed for toleration of burrow mates. But in humans, it was only known to facilitate birth and breastfeeding in women, as released by both sexes during sex.

So I had this idea that oxytocin might be the moral molecule. I did what most of us do; I tried it on some colleagues. One of them told me, "Paul, that is the world's stupidest idea." He said, "Only a female molecule can't be that important." But I countered, "Well, men's brains make this too. There must be a reason why." But he was right; it was a stupid idea, but it was testably stupid.

In other words, I thought I could design an experiment to see if oxytocin made people moral. It turned out it wasn't so easy. First of all, oxytocin is a shy molecule. Baseline levels are near zero without some stimulus to cause its release. When it is produced, it has a three-minute half-life and degrades rapidly at room temperature. So this experiment would have to cause a surge of oxytocin. I’d have to grab it fast and keep it cold.

I thought I could do that now. Luckily, oxytocin is produced both in the brain and in the blood, so I could do this experiment without learning neurosurgery. Then, I had to measure morality. So taking on morality with a capital "M" is a huge project, so I started smaller. I thought I'd study one single virtue: trustworthiness.

Why? I'd shown in the early 2000s that countries with a higher proportion of trustworthy people are more prosperous. In these countries, more economic transactions occur, and more wealth is created, alleviating poverty. So poor countries are, by and large, low-trust countries. If I understood the chemistry of trustworthiness, I might help alleviate poverty. But I'm also a skeptic. I don't want to just ask people, "Are you trustworthy?"

So instead, I used the Jerry Maguire approach to research: if you're so virtuous, show me the money! So what we do in my lab is tempt people with the virtue and vice by using money. Let me show you how we do that. We recruit some people for an experiment; they all get $10 if they agree to show up. We give them lots of instructions, and we never ever deceive them.

Then we match them in pairs by computer, and in that pair, one person gets a message saying, "Do you want to give up some of your $10 you earned for being here and ship it to someone else in the lab?" The trick is you can't see them; you can't talk to them. You only do it one time. Now whatever you give up gets tripled in the other person's account, going to make them a lot wealthier. They get a message by computer saying, "Person one sent you this amount of money. Do you want to keep it all or do you want to send some amount back?"

Okay, so think about this experiment for a minute. You're going to sit in these hard chairs for an hour and a half; some mad scientist is going to jab your arm with a needle and take four tubes of blood, and now you want me to give up this money and ship it to a stranger? So this was the birth of vampire economics: make a decision, give me some blood!

In fact, experimental economists had run this task around the world and for much higher stakes. The consensus view was that the transfer from the first person to the second was a measure of trust, and the transfer from the second person back to the first measured trustworthiness. But in fact, economists were fooled on why the second person would ever return any money. They assumed money is good; why not keep it all?

That's not what we found. We found 90% of the first decision-makers sent money. Of those who received money, 95% returned some of it. But why? Well, by measuring oxytocin, we found that the more money the second person received, the more their brain produced oxytocin. And the more oxytocin on board, the more money they returned.

So we have a biology of trustworthiness. But wait, what's wrong with this experiment? Two things. One is that nothing in the body happens in isolation. So we measured nine other molecules that interact with oxytocin, and they didn't have any effect. But the second is that I still only had this indirect relationship between oxytocin and trustworthiness. I didn't know for sure if oxytocin caused trustworthiness.

So from my experiment, I knew I had to go into the brain and manipulate oxytocin directly. I used everything short of a drill to get oxytocin into my own brain, and I found I could do it with a nasal inhaler. So along with colleagues in Zurich, we put 200 men on oxy or placebo and had them do that same trust task with money. We found that those on oxytocin not only showed more trust; we can more than double the number of people who sent all their money to a stranger—all without altering mood or cognition.

So oxytocin is the trust molecule, but is it the moral molecule? Using the oxytocin inhaler, we ran more studies. We showed that oxytocin infusion increases generosity in unilateral monetary transfers by 80%. We showed it increases donations to charity by 50%. I've also investigated non-pharmacologic ways to raise oxytocin. These include massage, dancing, and praying—yes, my mom was happy about that last one.

Whenever we raise oxytocin, people willingly open up their wallets and share money with strangers. But why do they do this? What does it feel like when your brain is flooded with oxytocin? To investigate this question, we had an experiment where we had people watch a video of a father and his four-year-old son. The son has terminal brain cancer. After they watched the video, we had them rate their feelings and took blood before and after it to measure oxytocin.

The change in oxytocin predicted their feelings of empathy. So it's empathy that makes us connect to other people. It's empathy that makes us help other people. It's empathy that makes us moral. Now, this idea is not new. A then-unknown philosopher named Adam Smith wrote a book in 1759 called "The Theory of Moral Sentiments." In this book, Smith argued that we are moral creatures not because of a top-down reason but for a bottom-up reason.

He said we're social creatures, so we share the emotions of others. If I do something that hurts you, I feel that pain, so I tend to avoid that. If I do something that makes you happy, I get to share your joy, so I tend to do those things. Now, this is the same Adam Smith who, 17 years later, would write a little book called "The Wealth of Nations," the founding document of economics. But he was, in fact, a moral philosopher, and he was right on why we're moral. I just found the molecule behind it.

But knowing that molecule is valuable because it tells us how to turn up this behavior and what turns it off—in particular, it tells us why we see immorality. So to investigate immorality, let me bring you back now to 1980. I'm working at a gas station on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, California. If you sit in a gas station all day, you see lots of morality and immorality, let me tell you.

So one Sunday afternoon, a man walks into my cashier's booth with this beautiful jewelry box. He opens it up; there's a pearl necklace inside. He said, "Hey, it was in the men's room. I just found this. What do you think we should do with it?" I said, "Put it in Lost and Found." He said, "Oh, this is very valuable; we have to find the owner for this."

Yeah, so we're trying to decide what to do with this when the phone rings, and a man says very excitedly, "I was in your gas station a while ago, and I bought this jewel for my wife, and I can't find it." I said, "Pearl necklace?" "Yeah! A guy just found it! Oh, you're saving my life! Here's my phone number; tell that guy to wait half an hour, I'll be there, and I'll give him a $200 reward!"

Great! So I tell the guy, "Look, relax; get yourself a fat reward! Life's good!" He said, "I can't do it! I have this job interview in Galita in 15 minutes, and I need this job! I got to go!" Again, he asked me, "What do you think we should do?" I'm in high school; I have no idea! So I said, "I'll hold it for you." He said, "You know, you've been so nice; let's split the reward. I'll give you the jewelry; you give me $100, and when the guy comes, you see it."

I was conned, right? This is a classic con called the pigeon drop, and I was the pigeon. So the way many cons work is not that the con man gets the victim to trust him; it's that he shows he trusts the victim. Now we know what happens: the victim's brain releases oxytocin, and you're opening up your wallet or purse and giving away the money, right?

So who are these people who manipulate our oxytocin systems? We found, testing thousands of individuals, that 5% of the population don't release oxytocin on stimulus. So if you trust them, their brains don't release oxytocin. If there's money on the table, they keep it all. So there's a technical word for these people: in my lab, we call them bastards. These are not people you want to have a beer with; they have many of the attributes of psychopaths.

Okay. Now, there are other ways the system can be inhibited. One is through improper nurturing. So we've studied sexually abused women, and about half of those don't release oxytocin on stimulus. Okay, you need enough nurturing for this system to develop properly. Also, high stress inhibits oxytocin. So we all know this: when we're really stressed out, we're not acting our best.

There's another way oxytocin is inhibited, which is interesting: through the action of testosterone. So we, in experiments, have administered testosterone to men, and instead of sharing money, they become selfish. Okay? But interestingly, high testosterone males are also more likely to use their own money to punish others for being selfish.

Now think about this: it means within our own biology, we have the yin and yang of morality. We have oxytocin that connects us to others, makes us feel what they feel, and we have testosterone. Men have ten times the testosterone as women, so men do this more than women. We have testosterone that makes us want to punish people who behave immorally. We don't need God or government telling us what to do; it's all inside of us.

Okay, right? So you may be wondering: "Oh, these are beautiful laboratory experiments; do they really apply to real life?" Yeah, I've been worrying about that too. So I've gone out of the lab to see if this really holds in our daily lives. So last summer, I attended a wedding in Southern England—200 people in this beautiful Victorian mansion. I didn't know a single person, and I drove up in my rented Vauxhall.

I took out a centrifuge and dry ice and needles and tubes, and I took blood from the bride and the groom and the wedding party, the family, and the friends before and immediately after the vows. Guess what? Weddings cause a release of oxytocin! But they do so in a very particular way. Who is the center of the wedding solar system? The bride! She had the biggest increase in oxytocin.

Who loves the wedding almost as much as the bride? Her mother! That's right; her mother was number two. Then the groom's father, then the groom, then the family, then the friends arrayed around the bride like planets around the sun. So I think it tells us that we've designed this ritual to connect us to this new couple, connect us emotionally. Why? Because we need them to be successful reproducing to perpetuate the species.

Also, I worried that my trust experiments with small amounts of money didn't really capture how often we actually trust our lives to strangers. So even though I have a fear of heights, I recently strapped myself to another human being and stepped out of an airplane at 12,000 ft. I took my blood before and after, and I had a huge spike in oxytocin.

There are so many ways we can connect to people, for example, through social media. Many people are tweeting right now! So we investigated the role of social media and found that using social media produced solid double-digit increases in oxytocin. So I ran this experiment recently for the Korean Broadcasting System, and they had the reporters and their producers participate.

One of these guys must have been 22; he had a 150% spike in oxytocin. I mean, astounding! No one has this! So he was using social media in private. When I wrote my report to the Koreans, I said, "Look, I don't know what this guy was doing, but my guess was interacting with his mother or his girlfriend." They checked; he was interacting on his girlfriend's Facebook page. There you go—that's connection!

So there's tons of ways that we can connect to other people, and it seems to be universal. Two weeks ago, I just got back from Papua New Guinea, where I went up to the highlands—very isolated tribes of subsistence farmers living as they have lived for millennia. There are 800 different languages in the highlands. These are the most primitive people in the world, and they indeed also release oxytocin.

Okay? So oxytocin connects us to other people. Oxytocin makes us feel what other people feel. It's so easy to cause people's brains to release oxytocin. I know how to do it, and my favorite way to do it is, in fact, the easiest. Let me show it to you. Come here, give me a hug! There you go! So my penchant for hugging other people has earned me the nickname Dr. Love. I'm happy to share a little more love in the world; it’s great!

But here's your prescription from Dr. Love: eight hugs a day. We have found that people who release more oxytocin are happier, and they're happier because they have better relationships of all types. Dr. Love says eight hugs a day! Eight hugs a day, and you'll be happier, and the world would be a better place! Of course, if you don't like to touch people, I can always shove this up your nose!

Thank you! Thank you! [Applause] [Music]