oxytocin does not affect reciprocity, just the tendency to take a social risk, to go out on a limb. Moreover, a second game, identical to the first except that the generosity of the trustees is randomly decided, shows no effect of oxytocin on the investors. So oxytocin specifically increases trusting, rather than general risk-taking. As with lovers and mothers, the hormone enables animals to take the risk of approaching other members of the species – it ‘links the overcoming of social avoidance with the activation of brain circuits implicated in reward’. It does this partly by suppressing the
...more
