Researchers at the Department of Rationality at the Hebrew University found that the love hormone oxytocin impairs the ability to detect deception and lies
Tu Bab starting today, is an opportunity to understand how love makes us not recognize when our spouse is cheating.
The natural hormone oxytocin is not called the "love hormone" by chance. Oxytocin is secreted during birth and mediates the emotional connection between the mother and the baby and encourages her to take care of him, and in addition it is secreted in men and women during orgasm and during falling in love and brings the parties emotionally close. Due to the important role played by the hormone in bonding between people, oxytocin has become one of the most studied hormones, and in recent years it has been discovered that inhaling the hormone in spray form increases the tendency to trust and show generosity. However, an Israeli study that will be published next month in the prestigious journal Psychological Science reveals a less pleasant side of the love hormone:
In a study conducted by Prof. Eyal Winter from the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University, his student Einav Hart and Dr. Shlomo Israel from Duke University in the USA, the researchers found that oxytocin causes people to lose their ability and motivation to detect deception and lies.
84 subjects participated in the study, half of whom inhaled an oxytocin spray and half inhaled a placebo spray without the hormone. Shortly after, all the subjects were asked to watch the popular American game 'Friend or Foes' in which two players can share a sum of money or steal it all for themselves. If both choose to share the payment then the money is divided equally between them. If one chose to share and the other chose to steal, then the thief gets the whole amount and the other gets nothing, and if both chose to steal then neither of the two gets nothing. Before the selection, the players talk for about 30 seconds. Of course, all participants have an interest in announcing - honestly or as a deception - that they will choose to divide the amount, but they have a selfish interest in cheating after the conversation and trying to take all the money for themselves.
The study showed that the subjects who did not inhale the oxytocin were able to distinguish beyond the level of guesswork, based on the facial expressions and body language of the participants in the program, which of the participants will choose to share the money with the other competitor and which of the participants only promise to share the money but will actually lie and choose the selfish option of stealing the all the money On the other hand, the subjects who inhaled oxytocin were unable to identify which of the participants in the program was lying and who was not. According to the researchers, this finding indicates that the love hormone reduces people's ability to detect deception and hostile intentions. Furthermore, the study found that the subjects who inhaled oxytocin rushed to answer the question of whether the participants of the program lied or not, and did not agree to invest effortful thinking on this issue.
"The research we conducted shows that the cliché according to which love makes people behave naively is true," says Prof. Winter. "The moment we feel in love, we may lose our natural ability to notice deception and lies and our desire to invest effort in identifying such behaviors. That's why we often hear stories about people in love who were deceived and taken advantage of in one way or another - they simply lost the necessary and important ability to be suspicious. In fact , the love hormone does not make us behave naively only towards the person we are in love with, but may make us To the innocent about anything and everything."
So how can you avoid the negative effect of the love hormone? "We cannot control the levels of oxytocin that our brain produces, but in the end the best way to deal with its dangerous effects is to simply use our intellect" suggests Prof. Winter Schaff who recently published the book "Rational Emotions" (Zamora Beitan) which deals with the fascinating bond Between emotions and rational behavior. "If we are aware that we are in love, we must take into account that this may affect our behavior and our level of suspicion. Therefore, when we are in love, in situations where we have to make decisions, we must ask ourselves whether we would have made the same decision in the past before we were under the influence of love." .
5 תגובות
If we inject couples in crisis with enough oxytocin... what will happen?
An alarming finding.
Are breastfeeding mothers, for example, more likely to fall into the hands of crooks, converts and so on?
I wonder what will happen if someone manages to spread the oxytocin in court…….
An interesting article. Perhaps we can add another interpretation to the topic that came up in the article, which is:
"The necessary and important ability to act suspiciously" The word necessary is more of an interpretation and a connection
To activate the suspicious feature in certain situations,
Compared to suspicion, which is a given and existing trait that varies in intensity from person to person,
A possible different interpretation could be that the "necessary ability" is to darken suspicion
To enable an intimate connection between a woman and a man, where the survival result of this is procreation and continuity.
Oxytocin is one of the physical/chemical means (there is also culture and more) by which we channel
our behavior,
In the current case, despite the risks, it sounds very logical to suppress human suspicion
that the result can be continuity/procreation - most of the systems we built are from before the era of contraceptives.
If it were not so, humanity would have been extinct long ago