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Topic: Do you smell trustworthy? (Read 583 times) |
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Hermit
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Do you smell trustworthy?
« on: 2005-11-11 22:03:03 » |
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Scientists Discover Trust Potion
Source: Live Science
Author: Bjorn Carey, LiveScience Staff Writer
Dated: 2005-06-01
Get someone to sniff a new potion made from the chemical oxytocin and they'll be more willing to loan you money.
Trust us on this.
Scientists discovered that inhaling the chemical made people more trusting in social situations with random people.
Researchers know very little about the biological basis of trust. Michael Kosfield and his colleagues at the University of Zurich believed oxytocin – a chemical widely known to enhance social bonding in animals and currently used to induce labor and lactation in human mothers – might play a role.
So Kosfield and his colleagues set up a game involving two people – one playing the role of an anonymous trustee who asked an investor for money for a risky scheme. Investors who sniffed oxytocin trusted the trustee significantly more and handed over their money much more readily, the scientists found.
To determine whether this result was truly trust oriented, the researchers did a control experiment that replaced the trustee with a computer. Investors – even those given oxytocin – were not as likely to risk their money to the automaton. Researchers say this result shows oxytocin enhances trust between individuals rather than just making people less averse to risks.
This study will be detailed in the June 2 issue of the journal Nature.
"The finding opens up possibilities for investigating conditions in which trust is either diminished, as in autism, or augmented," said Antonio Damasio, a University of Iowa researcher who was not involved in the research.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Eduard
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Re:Do you smell trustworthy?
« Reply #1 on: 2005-11-14 08:47:10 » |
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Do dogs like your smell???
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Insight?
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Nyktoo
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Re:Do you smell trustworthy?
« Reply #2 on: 2005-11-19 17:14:33 » |
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I googled this, and found there was already a company offering a product containing oxytocin. I googled for a little longer and the more I read about oxytocin the more I began to doubt the claims on the website offering the product. I just emailed them with this: -
Michael Kosfeld, a scientist on the team responsible for the study on Oxytocin's role in trusting others you mention at your website, told New Scientist (June 2005) that oxytocin takes nearly an hour to reach the brain. Your company claims, "everyone you encounter will immediately and unconsciously detect the pure human Oxytocin in Liquid Trust that you are wearing". How is the delayed influence of inhaled oxytocin not applicable to your product?
Concerning the ability to influence someone through air-borne oxytocin, another scientist involved in the above study named Dr. Fehr is quoted as saying, "The half-life of oxytocin in the air (in a spray) is just two or three minutes...Thus you would have to administer a permanent rainfall of it." Your product is described as having a time release effect, but there is no information given regarding the amount of oxytocin in each bottle. What concentration of oxytocin is released into the air after your product has been sprayed onto a surface?
I'm waiting for a response, but unless they douse me with the stuff, it had better be damn good.
Seems to me that this stuff, like pt141 (google it), wouldn't lend itself to being used discreetly on an unwitting victim. For consenting couples it just might prove a boon to their love life however. 
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