The Compassionate Instinct

At the same time, however, the results from these experiments raise fears of abuse. Some might suppose that unscrupulous employers or insurance companies could use oxytocin to induce trusting behavior in their employees or clients. Dishonest car salesmen might spray customers with the hormone before steering them toward a lemon.

Fortunately, most of these fears are baseless: the surreptitious administration of a substantial dose of oxytocin—for example, through air conditioning, food, or drinks—is technically impossible. Of course, one could always force the spray up another’s nose. But it’s safe to say that this would alarm recipients enough to override any glow they might get from the oxytocin.

It is more likely that advertisers might find ways to cleverly design stimuli to trigger the release of oxytocin in consumers through, for example, strategically placed smiling faces or warm handshakes or perhaps even by measuring people’s oxytocin levels in focus groups. All this might make these consumers more inclined to trust the claims made by the advertisers. Of course, advertisers (and most socially intelligent humans) have always intuitively understood ways to manipulate perception and build trust; this just gives them one more tool for their kit. However, knowledge can cut both ways: by better understanding the underlying biological mechanisms of these stimuli, research into oxytocin could be even more useful for protecting consumers from the manipulative strategies of marketing departments.

To some people, these findings about oxytocin might raise another concern: that trust is not subject to rational control—that it’s “all hormones.” This seems to stand in stark contrast to the traditional idea of trust being the outcome of a cognitive, rational process.

In my view, trust is both, just like other human social behaviors. We cannot deny that many of our decisions are governed by cognitive processes, which in the case of trust take into account the available information about the trustee’s motivation, the likelihood of a repeated interaction, and so on.

Nevertheless, research like this shows that our behavior is also influenced by a large number of very complex, yet identifiable, biological processes. Future research should help us understand how cognitive and biological processes interact in shaping our decisions about whom to trust.

But there’s no denying the important role trust plays in cooperative behaviors or that humans have a deeply rooted ability to trust. It’s up to us to earn that trust from one another.

PAY IT FORWARD

Robert A. Emmons

ELIZABETH BARTLETT is a professor of political science at a midwestern university. At the age of 42, her irregular heartbeat had become life-threatening. A heart transplant was her last hope, and she was fortunate to receive one. In a book chronicling her journey, she writes that she felt thankful for her new lease on life—but simply feeling thankful wasn’t enough.

I have a desire to do something in return. To do thanks. To give thanks. Give things. Give thoughts. Give love. So gratitude becomes the gift, creating a cycle of giving and receiving, the endless waterfall. Filling up and spilling over and perhaps not even to the giver but to someone else, to whoever crosses one’s path. It is the simple passing on of the gift.

What Bartlett describes is true gratitude. As this brief passage illustrates, gratitude is more than a pleasant feeling; it is also motivating. Gratitude serves as a key link between receiving and giving: it moves recipients to share and increase the very good they have received. Because so much of human life is about giving, receiving, and repaying, gratitude is a pivotal concept for our social interactions. The famed sociologist Georg Simmel declared that gratitude is “the moral memory of mankind.” If every grateful action, he went on to say, were suddenly eliminated, society would crumble.

Yet gratitude’s benefits are rarely discussed these days; indeed, in contemporary American society, we’ve come to overlook, dismiss, or even disparage the significance of gratitude.

Part of the problem, I think, is that we lack a sophisticated discourse for gratitude because we are out of practice. The late philosopher Robert Solomon noted how relatively infrequently Americans talk about gratitude. Despite the fact that it forms the foundation of social life in many other cultures, in America, we usually don’t give it much thought—with a notable exception of one day, Thanksgiving. On the other hand, we tend to scrutinize anger, resentment, happiness, and romantic love.