The Science of Morality

Long known as a female reproductive hormone – it plays a central role in childbirth and breastfeeding – oxytocin emerges from [Paul] Zak’s research as something much more all-embracing: the “moral molecule” behind all human virtue, trust, affection and love, “a social glue”, as he puts it, “that keeps society together”. The subtitle of his book, “the new science of what makes us good or evil”, gives a sense of the scale of his ambition, which involves nothing less than explaining whole swaths of philosophical and religious questions by reference to a single chemical in the bloodstream. Being treated decently, it turns out, causes people’s oxytocin levels to go up, which in turn prompts them to behave more decently, while experimental subjects given an artificial oxytocin boost – by means of an inhaler – behave more generously and trustingly.

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What counts is being trusted: trust in one person triggers oxytocin in the other, which triggers more trustworthy behaviour, and so on, in a virtuous circle. “Well, that’s except for the 5% of people who are ‘unconditional non-reciprocators’,” says Zak, referring to the consistent minority of people who seem immune to this cycle. “What we call them in my lab is ‘bastards’.”

  Raw Story

Because that's what they are. Many of them reside in New York City. Many in Washington, DC.  A great number of them in the Galveston-Houston area.  (Surely it's more than 5%.)

[The] fact that natural selection has given us oxytocin – a mechanism that allows us to be instinctively trusting and kind – suggests that what most of us think of as “moral” is, in fact, part of how we have evolved to be. […] The Golden Rule – treat others as you’d like to be treated – is, Zak writes, “a lesson that the body already knows”.

They'll be ripping Zak apart in Sunday Schools all over the country.