An article in Scientific American notes a recent study which indicates that a nasal hormone spray makes people who inhale it more trusting of others...

From Hormone Spray Elicits Trust in Humans:

...The hormone is oxytocin, which in nonhuman mammals is associated with social attachment, as well as a number of physiological functions related to reproduction. As such, it is believed to help animals overcome their natural tendency to avoid proximity and allow others to approach them. Hypothesizing that oxytocin might have a comparable role in human prosocial approach behaviors, such as trust, Michael Kosfeld of the University of Zurich and his colleagues devised a double-blind study to compare trusting tendencies in subjects given an oxytocin nasal spray and those given a placebo. After receiving either a single dose of the hormone or the placebo, participants played a trust game in which an investor chooses how much money to fork over to a trustee, who then decides how much to return after the amount is quadrupled. Subjects played the game using monetary units, which were exchanged for real money at the end of the experiment.

According to the researchers, oxytocin increased investor trust markedly, with 45 percent of the oxytocin group exhibiting the highest trust level, compared to just 21 percent of the placebo group. The team rejected the possibility that oxytocin might be promoting risk-taking in general, rather than social risk-taking specifically, because when investors were paired with a computer trustee instead of a human one they did not take such risks.

Describing the work today in the journal Nature, Kosfeld and his collaborators acknowledge that their findings could be misused...

Ya think?  There's a lot of buzz in the blogosphere about this right now, and there's no shortage of opinions.

The blog Hammer of Truth wonders "...how long do you think it will take before car dealerships install oxytocin spritzers at the showroom door... ?"

The blog johnhawks.net goes into great detail about the findings in this study and their implications. (Nice blog to check out btw if you are into anthropology.)  The author notes in a more levelheaded fashion that the advertising images we see today are often carefully selected for the effect they have on the human brain--manipulating trust is not new.

The simply named Ron's Blog lays the blame for the sensational sounding findings at the feet of science news reporters and greedy researchers:

...So why do the researchers say this, and why does the media suck it up? The latter question seems easy: Because most "science" reporters are twits, and are way more interested in a sexy "Clockwork Orange" imagery than in critical evaluation. And as for the researchers? To quote the (now) famous W. Mark "Deep Throat" Felt: Follow the money. The study's P.I. said that such clear results should "induce a new wave of oxytocin research in humans--I have the hope that this research will lead to clinical applications in psychiatric disorders that are associated with a lack of trust."

That's right: Big drug money for drugs for social phobias, autism, and anything else we might think conceivably has some element of "trust in others" contained within it...

AtlanticBlog quotes the New York Times quoting an e-mail from Dr. Ernst Fehr, a professor of economics at the University of Zurich and the senior author of the paper:

..."you cannot induce a pathologically high trust level in normal people by giving them oxytocin."

"If I abuse your trust once or twice, you are not going to trust me a third time even if I give you a high dosage of oxytocin," he said.

The prospect of used-car dealerships infusing the air with oxytocin to increase sales is also far-fetched, Dr. Fehr said. "The half-life of oxytocin in the air (in a spray) is just two or three minutes," he said. "Thus you would have to administer a permanent rainfall of it. This looks impossible to me." ...

What do you think?  Much ado about nothing?