字幕Trust.doc

Paul Zak: Trust, morality and oxytocin Is there anything unique about human beings? There is. Were the only creatures with fully developed moral sentiments. Were obsessed with morality as social creatures. We need to know why people are doing what theyre doing. And I personally am obsessed with morality. It was all due to this woman, Sister Mary Marastela, also known as my mom. As an altar boy, I breathed in a lot of incense, and I learned to say phrases in Latin, but I also had time to think about whether my mothers top-down morality applied to everybody. I saw that people who were religious and non-religious were equally obsessed with morality. I thought, maybe theres some earthly basis for moral decisions. But I wanted to go further than to say our brains make us moral. I want to know if theres a chemistry of morality. I want to know if there was a moral molecule. After 10 years of experiments, I found it. Would you like to see it? I brought some with me. This little syringe contains the moral molecule. (Laughter) Its called oxytocin. So oxytocin is a simple and ancient molecule found only in mammals. In rodents, it was known to make mothers care for their offspring, and in some creatures, allowed for toleration of burrowmates. But in humans, it was only known to facilitate birth and breastfeeding in women, and is released by both sexes during sex. So I had this idea that oxytocin might be the moral molecule. I did what most of us do -- I tried it on some colleagues. One of them told me, Paul, that is the worlds stupidist idea. It is, he said, only a female molecule. It cant be that important. But I countered, Well mens brains make this too. There must be a reason why. But he was right, it was a stupid idea. But it was testably stupid. In other words, I thought I could design an experiment to see if oxytocin made people moral. Turns out it wasnt so easy. First of all, oxytocin is a shy molecule. Baseline levels are near zero, without some stimulus