What if you could convince people to trust you and take risks for you with just a few drops of liquid surreptitiously placed in their water? There would be no drunkenness, no rufie-esque glazed eyes: just pure, human trust created via chemicals. The person wouldn't even know they'd been dosed. A study coming out tomorrow in the journal Neuron explains how this scenario is possible today, with just a small dose of the brain chemical oxytocin.
Oxytocin is a chemical associated with many of the "pleasurable" feelings you have, from basic trust, to love and orgasm. Researchers in Switzerland theorized that people playing social trust games might change their behaviors if given doses of oxytocin, since the chemical might artificially enhance their willingness to trust someone. Indeed, they were right: subjects dosed with Oxytocin were willing to trust people even after they'd been explicitly told that those people had behaved in untrustworthy ways in the past. People who had not been dosed did not trust the "untrustworthy" people.
Scary. More.
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