10.07.2015 Views

1E9Ct5D

1E9Ct5D

1E9Ct5D

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

Create successful ePaper yourself

Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.

five other people? For some students, the hypothetical victim was assigned a typicalDutch name, while other students heard a German or Arab name that evokes prejudiceamong the Dutch. The students who received oxytocin were far more likely to throwArabs and Germans under the train than they were to sacrifice their Dutch brethren. Onthe other hand, a control group that received no oxytocin treated the groups the same. 25A follow-up study at the same university looked at the effect oxytocin has on cheatingwhen people were assigned to ad hoc tribes. 26Robert Sapolsky summarizes the studyand its results:Subjects were told that they were part of a team of three volunteers (withno further information about teammates). Then each person played avirtual coin-toss game, with winnings to be divided among the three. Thegame was a great chance to lie: Players only had to report whether theyhad correctly guessed outcomes beforehand. Of course, guessing yieldsa 50% success rate, so the higher someone scored above 50%, the morelikely it was that they were cheating.Control subjects cheated plenty, claiming an average success rate of66%. With oxytocin, cheating rose to 79%. Moreover, oxytocindramatically increased the number of outrageous liars. Among controlsubjects, 23% reported an outcome with only a one-in-a hundred chance25 Id.26 Carsten K.W. De Dreu, Steven Scholte, Frans A.A.M. Van Winden & K. Richard Ridderinkhof, Oxytocintempers calculated greed but not impulsive defense in predator-prey contests, Social Cognitive andAffective Neuroscience, August 19, 2014.9

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!