Encourage camaraderie or break the rules? Hormone oxytocin influences cooperative conduct.
Hear me out, bud: Oxytocin, often tagged as the "love hormone," plays a significant role in governance of social and sexual interactions. It's mostly popular for its part in romantic and mother-infant bonding, but scientists are now exploring its impact on teamwork cooperation.
A research team headed by Jennifer McClung from the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland pondered over what drives our propensity to collaborate with others, or just antagonize and go solo. While numerous factors might be at play, these scientists zeroed in on one primary factor: our natural oxytocin levels.
Oxytocin is a crucial hormone and neurotransmitter. A recent study by this team, as detailed in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, scrutinized how oxytocin can influence our decision to collaborate and the conversations we engage in with our perceived teammates.
As McClung puts it, "For the very first time, we've looked at the realistic involvement of this hormone in spontaneous cooperation and conversation between people."
Sniffing out team spirit with an "egg hunt" game
McClung and her colleagues designed an "egg hunt" experiment, allowing them to observe collaboration choices, as well as interactions, between the participants.
During the game, participants were paired and tasked with locating eggs containing either red or blue-colored screws. Each player could bag a Swiss franc award for all the red or blue screws they collected.
Then, the participants were randomly assigned to either "apple" or "orange" groups, which generated a sense of faction loyalty between members of some pairs. Others would belong to different factions.
This arrangement, they expected, would foster a sense of camaraderie between participants in the same group.
During the hunt, each player could choose to collaborate with their partner, aiding them in hunting for screws they required, or opt to go it alone and collect only the colored screws they were pursuing.
Oxytocin, cooperation, and fellowship
To gauge oxytocin's impact on teamwork behavior, the scientists gauged the natural levels of the hormone in saliva samples from each participant.
The researchers discovered that individuals with higher oxytocin levels were far more likely to collaborate spontaneously, but there's a catch: this heightened collaboration could only be seen between people who belonged to the same group.
"The same elevated levels of oxytocin have little impact on two people affiliated to different groups," explained McClung. "Even if they have high levels of oxytocin, people from different groups hunted alone rather than being united in their goals and assisting each other."
On the dialogue side, the researchers realized that participants with high levels of oxytocin conversations revolved more around their partner's goals instead of their individual pursuits when they belonged to the same group. This discussion focussed on prompts such as "you collect your red screws" - but without actually lending a hand in that pursuit.
On the contrary, when participants belonged to different groups, even those with higher levels of oxytocin, conversations featured discussions of personal goals more predominantly.
In sum, these findings might suggest that oxytocin enhances social cues with a view to reinforcing acceptable social behavior and fostering cooperation among individuals within the same faction.
In a nutshell, oxytocin promotes teamwork and camaraderie among like-minded individuals, reinforcing the perception of social cues and bolstering cooperation. However, it can also foster bias against those perceived as outsiders, potentially influencing conversations and cooperation negatively. It's clear that this hormone plays a more complex role in social interactions than previously thought.
- The study conducted by Jennifer McClung's team, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, focused on the role of oxytocin in influencing cooperation and conversation between people.
- McClung and her colleagues designed an "egg hunt" experiment to observe collaboration choices and interactions between the participants.
- The researchers found that individuals with higher oxytocin levels were more likely to collaborate spontaneously, but only between people who belonged to the same group.
- Individuals with high levels of oxytocin, when belonging to different groups, tended to engage in conversations centered around their individual pursuits rather than collaborating or aiding each other.
- The findings suggest that oxytocin enhances social cues to reinforce acceptable social behavior and fosters cooperation among individuals within the same faction.
- However, oxytocin can also foster bias against those perceived as outsiders, potentially influencing conversations and cooperation negatively, indicating a more complex role in social interactions than previously thought.
