Trust in a Bottle 658
flosofl writes "The BBC has a report on oxytocin and its ability to skew our trust levels. 'The participants in the study played a game, in which they were split into "investors" and "trustees." The investors were then given credits and told they could chose whether to hand over zero, four, eight or 12 credits to their assigned trustee.' Some of the investors were given oxytocin via nasal spray. The results were surprising: 'Of 29 investors who were given oxytocin, 13 (45%) displayed "maximal trust" by choosing to invest highly, compared to six (21%) of the 29 investors who were given the dummy spray.' When the trustee was a computer, there was no difference between the two test groups."
But what is trust? (Score:2, Insightful)
How many people are led down the primrose path to Hell by some friend or lover who we trusted completely? Whether it be some sort of suddent infidelity or a constant wearing down of trust, that person eventually broke our trust.
Now, in the light of our experience, we look at all of our future relationships through the darkened glass of failed trust. Is it any wonder that half of all marriages end in divorce now? We can't open our hearts to those we love 100% because it means that we may have our trust abused again.
The problem isn't lack of trust. The problem is, and always has been, the lack of trustworthiness.
Number of participants (Score:3, Insightful)
Corporate uses (Score:5, Insightful)
You are missing on how this will be abused. Marketing firms will do anything to get you to buy. They made TV so you get 12 minutes of a show you want, then 3 minutes of louder and brighter commercials. That stopped working too well, so the marketing firms started paying television show producers to place thier products in shows.
Marketing firms hire psychologists and doctors to find ways to get people attention, put the consumer in a more relaxed and willing mood to buy their product.
Look at all the commercials on television that are for weight loss. They show beautiful women and guys with rock hard abs, they praise the product like it changed their life. Then in the smallest possible letters the following is written: "atypical results". To anyone who has not scored over 700+ on the SAT verbal, that probably has little meaning, if you can even see it!!
So how will this new scent that increases trust be used. Don't be suprised if you walk by an advertising poster in a local shopping mall, and get a wiff of something that makes you really believe whatever the poster says. Je'n sait pas, mais je crois!!
But the greatest harm this will do is to make us less trusting of each other. We will become more callous and apathetic. Nuerotransmitters are not available in unlimited qualities. Once used, it takes a time until more is available. Also, since this scent works on a phisiological level, we will no longer be as trusting, the threashold for trust on a phisiological level will be increased. This is just like the tolerance for capsiacin, or hot peppers. The first time someone has a jalepenjo, it will taste much hotter than the 500th habanero someone eats, even though the habanero is 100X hotter a pepper. The first burn is always the worst, the body adjusts the threshold for a nueron to fire.
So, what will we have. More companies trying to push their product down our throat. They will blur the line between advertising and getting a physiological response. And as a society, we will increasingly become less trusting, more apathetic, and more miserable.
Re:It's a BS experiment. (Score:4, Insightful)
Dude, have you ever heard of Ecstacy?
Droid trustee? (Score:3, Insightful)
The stormtrooper stared blankly at Kenobi, as his masks surgery-room-grade air scrubbers quietly filtered the chemical. A second more, and he decided the old man was bullshitting him. A quick signal and a short hail of blaster fire later, the occupants of the speeder were smoldering corpses, and the droids were in the care of a professional deprogrammer.
Doesn't have quite the mystique.
Re:**NEW** From RONCO! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Corporate uses (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's a BS experiment. (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course the only victim here is the person expressing trustworthy signals while intentionally aiming for manipulation for its own ends, knowing the signals to be fake.
What seems to happen is that the subconsciousness of the "seller" is picking up on the structures and processes involved in faking trust, and the perceived benefit of such behaviour. Consequently, parts of you that you are unaware of (which tend to be quite a few) start to employ this technique to get the "seller" itself into doing stuff based on trust. The net effect seems to be that you can not trust yourself, even while appearing "trustworthy" to you. Basically you start to fool yourself in a very organized and effective way, driving you deeper and deeper down the spiral.
This, of course, comes with quite a bunch of assumptions regarding mental processes, motivation etc. You may or may not agree with it, but it appears to be quite a good working model with outstanding capability to build valid hypotheses regarding possible future outcomes.
Usually you can "ask yourself" when you have betrayed your own trust, only to realize afterwards that you were coaxed into action thats not really in line with your true intentions.
People who have experience with various forms of addictions can probably testify to this without much introspection (if a proper amount of honesty is used).
My personal take on the matter would be that the more trained you become in exploiting trust, the harder it becomes to get trustworthy answers from yourself regarding matters of your own subjective makeup of the world.
Re:Corporate uses (Score:5, Insightful)
It's used to induce labor and terminate pregnancy (see the prescribing information) [rxlist.com].
If a store started spraying it into the air and women started going into labor and having premature babies, the lawsuits and legal settlements would be astronomical.
So who makes the stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
Nightclubs, sales offices, news conferences, shops, sprays, deodourants, perfumes etc etc etc. Actually it doesn't really matter if the specific delivery mechanism works, only that the person buying it has read the science and believes it does.
Re:Corporate uses (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Corporate uses (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference is that these troublesome drugs are self-administered. Legislate against that and you've a problem. But this is something that would be used on others.
Think - you're not going to apply this chemical to make you more trusting, it'll be used on others. It's a chemical assault and should be illegal.
An interesting place to find debate on this sort of stuff is here [cognitiveliberty.org]