Oxytocin increases trust in humans with a low disposition to trust
Vogt, B.; Bengart, P.; Declerck, C.; Fehr, E.
Show abstract
In recent years, increasing skepticism regarding oxytocins (OT) influence on social behavior arose. Low power, HARKing (hypothesizing after the results are known), and replication failures have clouded the field. Here, we directly address these concerns with a high-powered, preregistered study that offers robust evidence for a causal effect of OT on trust among individuals with a low disposition to trust. We recruited 359 low-trusting individuals who participated in a trust game under strict anonymity conditions. Results show that OT administration significantly increased trusting behavior by roughly 15%, with consistent effects across regression models with and without controls for personality traits. A pooled data analysis incorporating a previous sample (n=219) of low-trusting individuals further strengthens this conclusion, yielding a statistically significant 16.9% increase in trust. Crucially, no interaction effect was found between OT and the degree of dispositional trust, suggesting OTs effect is uniform across the low-trusting spectrum. These findings present a strong case for OTs selective trust-enhancing role. By isolating OTs impact within a well-defined subpopulation and experimental context, this study provides a critical pivot in the debate over neurobiological mechanisms of trust.
Matching journals
The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
- Latent motives guide structure learning during adaptive social choice 93%
- Correlations between human mating partners: a comprehensive meta-analysis of 22 traits and raw data analysis of 133 traits in the UK Biobank 92%
- Shared striatal activity in decisions to satisfy curiosity and hunger at the risk of electric shocks 92%
Similar papers in this journal
- Developmental asymmetries in learning to adjust to cooperative and uncooperative environments 93%
- Reducing Movement Synchronization to Increase Interest Improves Interpersonal Liking 93%
- Spontaneous eye blink rate predicts individual differences in exploration and exploitation during reinforcement learning 92%
Similar papers in this journal
- Oxytocin, but not vasopressin, decreases willingness to harm others by promoting moral emotions of guilt and shame 92%
- Stress-related emotional and behavioural impact following the first COVID-19 outbreak peak 90%
- Leveraging genome-wide data to investigate differences between opioid use vs. opioid dependence in 41,176 individuals from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium 90%
Similar papers in this journal
- Direct serotonin release in humans shapes decision computations within aversive environments 93%
- Ageing disrupts reinforcement learning whilst learning to help others is preserved 92%
- Action initiation and punishment learning differ from childhood to adolescence while reward learning remains stable 92%
Similar papers in this journal
- Stress-Induced Mucin 13 Reductions Drive Intestinal Microbiome Shifts and Despair Behaviors 88%
- Complement C3 and C3aR mediate different aspects of emotional behaviours; relevance to risk for psychiatric disorder 88%
- Fatigue during acute systemic inflammation is associated with reduced mental effort expenditure while task accuracy is preserved 88%
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.