Whoosh

In my last post (read it first), I noted new research that suggests that oxytocin does induce trust in another (as my other posts here have made clear) but that it does not make one gullible as long as there are cues about if another person is trustworthy.

If you’ve read other posts I’ve written, you have likely figured out that I think there are good reasons to be concerned about how fast people hook up and become sexually involved with others. (In addressing these things, I’m not really focusing on big questions of how long one waits for sex—including all the way to marriage. I have views on that, but I’m working on the other end of the whole deal about just how fast things happen for so many these days.)

To recap other posts, oxytocin gets rolling with all sorts of things happening in a relationship, including touching, hugging, kissing, touching, sexual contact, etc. Hence, if oxytocin induces trust, one will be chemically nudged toward trusting a new partner one is physically intimate with as soon as things get touchy. I’ve expressed concerns that all the chemistry going on can make some people misread the situation, seeing something more meaningful than what is real or misreading cues about a partner who is not such a great choice.

Quick Illustration (otherwise known as a short bunny trail): Have you ever been in a serious chemistry area, such as a chem classroom in high school or college, or a real chem lab in some work or health setting? I’m thinking of chem labs in college. Have you noticed the overhead showers with the chain to pull and the eye washing stations? You may never have seen such in action, but you’ve likely seen what I’m talking about. Those devices are for emergencies; they are for unfortunate chemists who have gotten the wrong chemicals all over their bodies or into their eyes. In such cases, the key is rapidly flushing away the chemical before too much damage is done. Back to love. It’s blind, you know, or can be—chemically blind, that is. I don’t really mean love, of course. I mean lust and desire. (I’m not down on desire, btw; it’s a “handle with care thing,” though.) Ever known someone who needs to run to the eyewash station and flush away the chemical blindness they have going in some relationship before it’s too late? Perhaps that’s been you. Some wouldn’t do too badly to quickly use the eyewash station and then also pull the chain for the giant cold shower that’s right next door to it. Whoosh. Reset. Handle chemistry more carefully next time.

The research I wrote about last post suggests that all is not hopeless in terms of chemical blindness. Oxytocin (and, doubtless, other chemicals of coursing love—of course) are not all powerful. They can be countered with a little information that helps a person go more slowly on the path ahead. They key thing about this experiment I described last time is that the trust-relevant information was clearly received by the participants who were, thereafter, less blindly affected by the extra jolt of oxytocin.

What does that mean in the real world, the one not being carefully controlled by an experimenter? It means going slow, having boundaries, and getting useful information that can inform decisions about what one will do rather than sliding into situations that are risky and unwise. It used to be that people got information or cautions from family and friends. I’m sure some of the former and a lot of the latter still give useful advice and caution to people. But I also bet that there is a lot less of both than years ago. And it’s an easy bet that these things go sooo must faster now than in the past. Speed is an enemy of seeing warning signs. A driver going so fast down a mountain has little chance of staying in the lines or reacting to warning signs, even if she wants to do so.

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Gullible or Just Extra Nice?

A study just came out today that adds some potential insights to my earlier posts about oxytocin. (See my earlier posts where I describe what oxytocin seems to be related to and how that may affect relationships.) Moïra Mikolajczak, James J. Gross, Anthony Lane,
Olivier Corneille, Philippe de Timary, and Olivier Luminet just published a paper in the Journal Psychological Science where they tested if oxytocin beefs up both trust AND gullibility or just trust. This is another of those ingenious experiments where experimenters use a game theory, exchange scenario called “The Trust” game. (Sounds like a fun game for Saturday night at a party, right?). Two participants at a time (who could not see each other) would play the game, presumably online, meaning they would not see the other participant.

The experimenters manipulated two variables: people’s exposure to oxytocin (given nasally) and cues about reliability of trustworthiness of the person they were playing the game with. Imagine you are playing this Trust game. You are going to try to maximize what you can earn which will be based on how much you decide to trust the other person. (I’ll spare you further details on that part.) You might wonder how they manipulated trustworthiness. They described, for participants, the person they were playing with in terms that implied trustworthiness or not. These descriptions of high trustworthiness or low trustworthiness given randomly, meaning, the descriptions would affect the participant’s sense of who they were playing with, but the descriptions were not really true of who they were playing with. By the way, in such experiments where any kind deception is used, participants are told immediately afterwards about it as the experiment is explained to them.

You might wonder what they told people to make the person they were playing with seem to be trustworthy or not. Here is where I might quibble a bit with their strategy, but to be trustworthy, you were described as having a major like philosophy; but you’d be tipped in the direction of thinking the other person was untrustworthy by being told he or she was in marketing. (If I were a marketing major, I would take offense. Then I’d think carefully about how to give people a better impression.) Or, you might be told the other person was active in practicing to give first aid (trusty) or loved to play violent sports (not as trusty). Note: It’s not that the less trustworthy folks were described as scum or something vile. The experimenters were simply going for less versus more trustworthy in the seeds that were planted.

What did they find? Oxytocin produced increases in trust UNLESS participants were given cues that who they were playing with was not so trustworthy. That’s pretty cool. They showed that oxytocin is not a blanket producer of blind trust. If one gets cues that another person could be someone to be leery of, oxytocin will not completely override that.

Okay, think about that some. I’ll write more in the next post about implications for love and romance. Before I do, think about what you might tell someone you know who is looking for love based on this study and other things I’ve written about oxytocin and commitment.

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Coasting: Drive by Opportunities

As you can tell, there is something about Sliding vs. Deciding that I think a lot about. In the briefest version of the concept, our team refers to sliding as situations where a person could be thinking about what is going on and making a decision, but instead, things are just happening to that person. The idea of all here is that there are important times in relationships (or work, or projects, or whatever you are into) where we might not notice that a pretty big transition is happening that we probably should be making a decision about; instead, we are is sliding into wherever we will end up. There is a lot of sliding in romantic relationships, these days, when it comes to sex or living together or having a child—times when something pretty big and life altering is happening but many times people are not making a decision about it. I’ll say a lot more about this in the future.

Here, I want to introduce a concept that is subtly different from Sliding but that has some overlap—Coasting. Coasting is what I call it when one is moving along through life, and not really sliding into anything risky but just not noticing important choice points are whizzing by. Coasting is not noticing when were at a place where a decision could make all the difference between drifting away from one’s life goals and reaching those goals.

Metaphor time:

The risk of Sliding is somewhat like turning accidentally down a dead-end alley that has no turn offs, and as you get all the way in, you find out your reverse gear does not work. You end up in a riskier place because you slid into a place that is hard to get out of and now there are more limits on your future options.

The risk of Coasting is more like rolling on down a big highway, just cruising along, and missing a crucial turn off that was a more direct path to what you really wanted to have happen in your life. It’s sort of like being on auto-pilot. If the direction you are headed is already where you meant to go, there’s no problem with coasting along because you are already on the right road. But if you need to turn off to reach your goals, Coasting won’t do.

Think of all the places we can coast in life: Career goals. Education goals. Marriage or parenting (family) are big areas where there are opportunities you may, in the future, wish you took in terms of time and attention with those you love, but life is Coasting by.

Why it is so easy to Coast? Because it takes energy and concentration to notice when you need to make a decision or do something other than what is just happening to you. It is harder work, anytime in life, when we are making decisions. It’s especially easy to coast by important moments or opportunities when we are tired and busy. There’s just not a lot of energy left to do anything different. Doing something different requires a decision and energy to pursue it.

I hope I’m not sounding, in any way, preachy here. If I am, I’m preaching to myself as much as anyone else. I can’t imagine the person in this day and age who cannot relate to the problem of coasting. The antidote, of course, is to think about where you really want your life to be or head, and make the right turn-offs to get there. And even if one makes the right turns pretty frequently, there will still be coasting. I think the reasonable goal is to just try to make as many of the right turns (or left) as we can while accepting that we will miss some of them. Life seems to me to be more like a compass than a GPS device.

In his wonderful book, Stumbling on Happiness, researcher Daniel Gilbert makes the point that later in life, people tend to have more regrets about good things not done than bad things done. Coasting is the engine of future regrets.

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Oxytocin: I Feel Your Pain

It’s hard for me to get tired of Oxytocin stories. I’m quite attached to them. Here’s the latest, which you can read about in a story by the BBC (here). Professor Keith Kendrick, a neuroscientist at Cambridge University, conducted a pretty straightforward laboratory study of people’s reactions to different, emotionally evocative pictures (child crying, grieving older man, etc.). He found that the emotional response of men to these types of pictures was as strong as the reactions women typically have when the men had a dose of oxytocin (nasally). Usually, women have stronger “empathic” responses to such pictures than men, which could be for scads of reasons of the sort I’ve written about recently. But men closed the gap if they had the spray of oxytocin and didn’t if they has a placebo. I find this next part extra interesting and conscientious on the part of the researchers. While the men behaved differently based on oxytocin, they could not accurately guess whether they had gotten the oxytocin spray or something inert. That’s compelling.

In a second laboratory experiment, the researchers showed that those who got a little jolt of oxytocin were more reactive to, or responsive to, smiling faces that reward learning. That’s just that much more evidence of the role oxytocin might play in sociability, bonding, and caring for others.

I remember when I first read about oxytocin spray; it was in a report of a study by economist Paul Zak. He was showing that people made more trusting bargains in classic game theory scenarios in the lab if they had a bit of oxytocin (again, nasally). When I first read of that work, I thought, “How soon before this shows up in bars.” After all, all the evidence suggests that oxytocin moves people in the direction of trusting others. Zak has even speculated that the stress of poverty depresses oxytocin levels to such a degree across a community that this is just one factor among many that makes it hard to turn around deeply entrenched poverty—people cannot gain on trusting others, and without some basic trust, you can’t really have an economy that works well (or a community). Might car dealerships want oxytocin spray wafting through their waiting rooms? Obviously, car manufacturers need people to trust them or else they are not going to buy their product. Maybe that new car scent should be laced with oxytocin? Especially in test drives! (That could make that deception so like the effect of un-careful dating as to not really be funny but sobering.)

But, back to bars. Since there are really date rape drugs that seem to have some effect, would people misuse oxytocin in a similar way to influence others? I know at one point Paul Zak didn’t think this type of thing would happen, but you never know. Something that turns out to have a clear effect that can be used for good might also be used in less good ways. There’s something in the air.

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Movin and Groovin: Do you want to be a rotator or a sitter?

Some time ago, I blogged on a cool study by Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel. In this post, I want to highlight another study by these two social psychologists. Here is the journal reference, but you might have trouble finding it if you want to read the whole thing.

Finkel, E. J., & Eastwick, P. W. (2009) Arbitrary social norms influence sex differences in romantic selectivity. Psychological Science, 20, 1290 – 1295.

Finkel and Eastwick have done a number of fascinating studies using speed-dating methods. (If you don’t know what speed-dating is, Google it. It’s not a date where you drive to the end of the block, kiss, and then return your date within 10 minutes.) In the study referenced above, they tested if the mere fact of being the one approaching others impacts how attracted you are to others. In speed-dating, there are rotators and sitters. The sitters sit still while the rotators move every minute or two to the next person they get to meet for a minute or two. Historically, men are almost always chosen to rotate and women are chosen to be the sitters. Men get to move and women get to wait for men to come to them. One more detail. Women are typically more choosey at these events than moen (men indicate they would like to follow-up with more women than women do with men).

Finkel and Eastwick tested three really interesting ideas:

1. Are rotators more attracted to the people they meet in a speed-dating event than sitters?

2. Do women become more attracted more men when they are the rotators versus sitters?

3. Is there self-confidence boost from being a rotator?

Yes. Yes. Yes. (No, Harry didn’t meet Sally.) Let’s start with number 1. Part of what Finkel and Eastwick tested is if rotators are more attracted to more people simply because they are the ones on the move. In other words, does moving toward a partner give you some boost in attraction toward that potential partner merely because you are moving toward them rather than vice versa? They found solid evidence that being the one on the move—being the rotator in speed-dating—boosted attraction to others. This is similar to the effect of becoming a bit happier if you smile—after you smile. Feelings can follow behaviors.
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Here’s the really smart part. Finkel and Eastwick had women be the rotators in one half of the groups and men in the other half. That way, they could test if it was really rotators who were more attracted because they were rotating and not that men were less choosey than women. Voila! It did matter. When women were rotators, they were attracted to more men than when women were sitters. The differences between men and women disappeared when women were the rotators. Pretty cool. Movin is grooving. (Of course, as Bill Coffin at the Administration for Children and Families Observed, once married, the rotating should stop. Right?)

Lastly, Finkel and Eastwick showed that this effect of being the one moving was related to self-confidence. Being the rotator was associated with more self-confidence which was associated with attraction to more people. I’m going to leave that there until the next post. 

Relationship Development and Oxytocin: A Theory of Men and Women

Theory alert!

I’m going to lay out a little theory here that is one I would love to be able to test fully in the future. It has to do with some average differences in how men and women behave during earlier periods of relationship development. This builds on themes from the prior three posts. Let’s recap a few crucial points of foundation for the theory I will lay out here:

- Oxytocin levels are stimulated by many things, including affectionate and sexual touch.
- Oxytocin is a chemical that is centrally related to attachment and trust.
- There is at least some evidence (in two studies from our lab) that the sacrificial behavior of men is more related to long-term commitment than is sacrificial behavior of women.

The last point begs the question about what sacrificial behavior is linked to in women. I mentioned in the last post that Sarah Whitton and I have suggested that this is partly and simply about the fact that women are more socialized to sacrifice in romantic relationships than men—at least about daily things.

Here’s my theory to add to this mix. Maybe long-term commitment is a more important driver of sacrificial behavior in men while having a strong attachment-bond is a more important driver of sacrificial behavior in women. Further, maybe the fact that women have more robust oxytocin systems is part of a biological basis for this difference.

The implications of this possible difference are not very great in solid marriages. Both partners have an attachment-bond and both have developed clear, long-term commitment. Things will balance out in terms of the partners giving to each other.

What about early on in relationship development? What are the implications of such a difference? If my theory is correct—or even somewhat correct—it means that women will sacrifice more for their male partners than vice versa early on, and continue to do so for some time up until the point where the male catches up once a clear commitment to the future has developed. I’ve depicted it as follows.



Note that the line for sacrificial behavior of the female ramps up fast and the line for sacrificial behavior of the male catches up some time later. Please note that what I depict here is the best case, not the worst. In just one form of the worst case (or a not so great case), a female sacrifices a great deal for the male and that particular male never catches up because he never really commits deeply to the future.

If I am correct in this theory, the average female is at a disadvantage once the attachment is strong and the oxytocin is flowing up until the point that the male catches up with commitment. Further, since oxytocin levels affect trust, it could be harder for the average woman to see this imbalance for some time, because the biology has primed her to see things from a trusting perspective.

PLEASE NOTE: This theory is not saying that women are superior to men or that this is a particular problem with men. In fact, in our work, find that men are just as committed, on average, as women, in marriage. What this theory suggests is that patterns of rapid relationship development (especially when things get really physical) is something people who attach strongly and rapidly need to be aware of and be cautious about—male or female. This person may give too much and not realize it for some time.

The risk I am identifying exists in any relationship where one partner feels the need to give a lot more than they are getting back. Since relationships develop so rapidly these days, I think some form of these dynamics are happening to many couples.

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Well, It’s Men: Does He Flip for Her?

[I’m sorry that took awhile to get back to this theme. I’ve been over-busy working on a grant.]

In my last post, I left you with a question about whether attitudes about sacrificing for one’s partner are more related to commitment to the future of the relationship for men or women. Well, it’s men. This doesn’t mean that we found that men were more willing to sacrifice. We found no difference between men and women on overall level of willingness to sacrifice. What I’m focusing on here is that sacrifice was more related to being committed to the future for men than women. And I decided not to bring this back to oxytocin until the next post, but that’s coming.

So, what does this mean that sacrificing may be more tied to long term commitment in men than women? Sarah Whitton and I suggested that one of the reasons this could be the case is that women are simply more socialized to “give” of themselves to others, and that this would make women more likely to sacrifice (or have positive attitudes about sacrificing) no matter how clear the future is in a relationship. Men, on the other hand, may be more likely to need to decide that a particular woman is “the one” for the future in order to really give their all to that woman. Ironically, it’s men not women that most strongly fit what we predicted beforehand in this work. After all, it only makes sense that one would be most willing to sacrifice for someone with whom they see a future. It’s just in those two studies from our lab listed in my last posting, it seems that this is most true for men and only weakly true for women (on average).

My next point go somewhat further from the data than the interpretation above. I think the point is valid and practically important, but it really is more theoretical. I’d like to test everything in this line of reason more fully in future studies. Here goes.

I think commitment for the average man is a bit more like a light switch that gets flipped on (or not) at some point with a particular women when it comes to commitment. It’s flipped or switched on once he becomes clear that she’s who he wants to be with in the future. Until it’s flipped, he may be in love and he may be great to be around, but he’s not crossed over to where he’ll give regularly for that partner without resenting it. I think the average women crosses over to giving more fully sooner in how the average relationship develops. So, if we have the average women and the average man in a relationship together, early on, I’m betting she’s going to move more quickly to fully to sacrificing than him.

Think about that. There’s no great problem if this is true except where the guy never catches up. And that’s why books like “He’s Just Not That Into You” are bestsellers, because it too often never does catch up. If commitment is more like a switch being flipped for the average male, women are at greater risk for over-giving in romantic relationships until he flips—for her. Based on this theory, I’ve often suggested to women that they be careful not to give too much until they can find the switch and see if it is working. This advice is just as good for men, by the way, in relationships where they are the ones to give too much until the commitment is becoming clear.

Next time I’ll get back to biology and oxytocin and talk about an expansion of this theory that takes oxytocin into account. I bet you can see where that’s going. And go we will, next time.

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