Limits to the Love Drug

Submitted by Esichang, class of 2012:

While most of us like to believe that love has no limit, the oxytocin hormone, commonly known as “the love drug,” or “the cuddle chemical,” has been shown to have definite boundaries. The chemical typically known to give mothers the urge to nurse their children, keep male prarie voles monogamous, and even increase our ability to trust others, seems to have its own set of standards. Psychologists are now describing it as the agent of ethnocentrism (the practice of evaluating other peoples and cultures according to the standards of ones own).
After multiple ethical experiments, Carsten K. W. De Dreu, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, and his colleagues concluded that doses of oxytocin made people more likely to favor the in-group at the expense of an out-group. The experiments they did were based off of ethnic attitudes, using Muslims and Germans as the out-groups for his subjects, Dutch college students. These groups of people were chosen because of a poll in 2005 that showed that 51 percent of Dutch citizens held unfavorable opinions about Muslims, and other surveys that Germans, although seen by the Dutch as less threatening, were nevertheless regarded as “aggressive, arrogant and cold.” During one of the experiments, the students were given a moral dilemma in which they had to choose between helping a person onto an overloaded lifeboat, thereby drowning the five already there, or saving five people in the path of a train by throwing a bystander onto the tracks. The five people who might be saved were nameless, but the sacrificial victim had either a Dutch or a Muslim name and it turned out that subjects who had taken oxytocin were far more likely to sacrifice the Muhammads than the Maartens.
While this may seem a little discriminatory, Dr. Dreu and his colleagues concluded that rather than strengthening negative feelings, oxytocin hormone enhanced feelings of loyalty to the “in-group.” This conclusion may have been drawn because of the chemical's earlier connotations but is still being debated and researched.

For more info on the love drug, visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/science/11hormone.html?_r=1&ref=science