FuturePundit: Oxytocin Infusion Makes People More Generous With Money
I don’t agree with randall’s conclusions necessarily…
Oxytocin Infusion Makes People More Generous With Money Paul Zak, a professor at Claremont, Angela Stanton at Chapman University, and Sheila Ahmadi at UCLA Geffen School of Medicine have found that injecting people with oxytocin makes them more generous.
Human beings routinely help strangers at costs to themselves. Sometimes the help offered is generous—offering more than the other expects. The proximate mechanisms supporting generosity are not well-understood, but several lines of research suggest a role for empathy. In this study, participants were infused with 40 IU oxytocin (OT) or placebo and engaged in a blinded, one-shot decision on how to split a sum of money with a stranger that could be rejected. Those on OT were 80% more generous than those given a placebo. OT had no effect on a unilateral monetary transfer task dissociating generosity from altruism. OT and altruism together predicted almost half the interpersonal variation in generosity. Notably, OT had twofold larger impact on generosity compared to altruism. This indicates that generosity is associated with both altruism as well as an emotional identification with another person.
The idea is that if you increase the extent to which you care about the feelings of others then you’ll behave in ways that reduce the amount of negative response they’ll have. Obviously, the extent to which humans feel empathy for others varies enormously. We feel different amounts of empathy depending on who the other person is and what the circumstances are. Also, people differ from each other in the amount of empathy they feel in similar circumstances. Some really lack in empathy.
They draw a distinction between altruism and generosity and find that oxytocin (OT) boosts generosity more than it boosts altruism.
In this paper we investigate a mechanism that may produce generosity while dissociating generosity from altruism. Altruism is defined as helping another at a cost to oneself [Sober, p 17, 15] (PLOS One). Generosity is defined as “liberality in giving” [16] (PLOS One) or offering more to another than he or she expects or needs. Generosity is therefore a subset of altruism. For example, one may give a homeless person 25 cents (altruism) or ten dollars (altruism and generosity).
I think use of a homeless person is a poor example. I once read an article by a police officer arguing against donations to homeless people because the homeless in my town have plenty of food and places to sleep and use the money to buy alcohol and drugs. In other words, altruism doesn’t always help recipients.
They were trying to figure out how much the feeling of empathy causes altruistic and generous behavior.
We investigated the role of empathy in producing generosity by manipulating a physiologic mechanism hypothesized to instantiate empathy, the neuromodulator oxytocin (OT). A substantial animal literature has established that OT facilitates attachment to offspring, and in monogamous mammals, cohabiting sexual partners and same-sex conspecifics [31] (PLOS One)–[33] (PLOS One). Recent human studies have shown that OT facilitates a temporary attachment between strangers, increasing trust and reciprocity [34] (PLOS One)–[38] (PLOS One). In the present paper, we test whether OT is a proximate mechanism prompting generosity between anonymous human strangers. Two tasks were used to dissociate the physiologic role of empathy in producing generosity and altruism using monetary transfers. Monetary transfers were used to obtain objective and active measures of generosity and altruism.
They used two different games where one person was given cash and the games provided different incentives to the person who started out with the cash as to whether to give to the other person in the game. The differences between the games allowed them to separate out the influence which OT has on altruism versus generosity. Well, OT boosts generosity more than it boosts altruism. Read the full paper (it is open access on Plos One) for a longer description of their findings.
I suspect altruism and generosity will become less common in the future. Selective pressures and genetic engineering will reduce the incidence of these traits because the traits are less adaptive in really large scale societies. You don’t have enough repeat dealings with a small group of people to make altruistic behavior a big benefit. I also suspect humans will become more clannish and there’ll be less a sense of a common interest and the belonging to a commonwealth.
By Randall Parker 2007 November 06 09:24 PM Brain Altruism
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