Oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism

Abstract

Human ethnocentrism—the tendency to view one's group as centrally important and superior to other groups—creates intergroup bias that fuels prejudice, xenophobia, and intergroup violence. Grounded in the idea that ethnocentrism also facilitates within-group trust, cooperation, and coordination, we conjecture that ethnocentrism may be modulated by brain oxytocin, a peptide shown to promote cooperation among in-group members. In double-blind, placebo-controlled designs, males self-administered oxytocin or placebo and privately performed computer-guided tasks to gauge different manifestations of ethnocentric in-group favoritism as well as out-group derogation. Experiments 1 and 2 used the Implicit Association Test to assess in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. Experiment 3 used the infrahumanization task to assess the extent to which humans ascribe secondary, uniquely human emotions to their in-group and to an out-group. Experiments 4 and 5 confronted participants with the option to save the life of a larger collective by sacrificing one individual, nominated as in-group or as out-group. Results show that oxytocin creates intergroup bias because oxytocin motivates in-group favoritism and, to a lesser extent, out-group derogation. These findings call into question the view of oxytocin as an indiscriminate “love drug” or “cuddle chemical” and suggest that oxytocin has a role in the emergence of intergroup conflict and violence.

Reply to Chen et al.: Perhaps goodwill is unlimited but oxytocin-induced goodwill is not

“…Chen et al (1) raise several issues with the data and interpretations published in De Dreu et al (2). We appreciate their constructive remarks.…”

“…We posit that this has important thought-provoking implications for intergroup tension and conflict and invites new research into the neuroendocrinology of human conflict and cooperation within as well as between groups. Without downplaying the possible roles of vasopressin and testosterone (1), our findings (2,5) showed that oxytocin's role in intergroup competition and conflict should not be underestimated.…”

Opposing Oxytocin Effects on Intergroup Cooperative Behavior in Intuitive and Reflective Minds

“…Second, it is well recognized that emotional processing is linked to the intuitive rather than reflective system (Evans, 2008;Lieberman, 2007). The previous oxytocin effects on ingroup favoritism were mainly observed in the contexts of emotional situations, for example, ingroup favoritism in empathy for other's painful feeling (Sheng et al, 2013), ingroup-favored behaviors in an intergroup competition setting (De Dreu et al, 2010, 2011, or emotional moral judgment (De Dreu et al, 2011). Therefore, it is possible that the previous findings mainly reflect the oxytocin effect when intuition is favored (either by default or activated by emotional system).…”

Oxytocin facilitates protective responses to aversive social stimuli in males

“…Ample evidence for this view comes from a plethora of behavioral experiments in healthy subjects (1), which have demonstrated beneficial effects of a single intranasal dose of OXT across a wide range of cognitive tasks, probing, for example, interpersonal trust and cooperation (2, 3; see also ref. 4), generosity (5), social recognition (6)(7)(8) and related memory (9)(10)(11), social reinforcement learning and emotional empathy (12), and social judgments (13)(14)(15).…”