Sniff-to-Trust
Those scientists just can’t keep their hands out of the cookie jar, can they? Researches at the University of Iowa’s College of Medicine have discovered a hormone that increases trust:
That’s the remarkable finding of a new study in which people who inhaled a brain chemical called oxytocin became more trusting, allowing a partner to invest more simulated money than people who didn’t get the hormone.
It could be a surreal fantasy come true for con men or politicians, though for now neuroscientists are the ones most excited about the report by Swiss and American researchers, to be published today in the journal Nature.
If you read further into the article, the head of neurology makes this worrying half-joke: “One has visions of political operatives spraying it at rallies.” Heh, heh. Great, in a decade the world’s going to morph into some vast Iowan empire.
