Thursday, August 17, 2017

Oxytocin Test Story

This came out of a science report associated with Science Daily concerning an odd experiment with Germans.

So, the Bonn University Hospital decided to do an experiment with oxytocin (it was discovered just over a hundred years ago, as a hormone).  The purpose discovered for it?  It helps women proceed toward childbirth (yanking and pulling on the cervix and uterus....for labor purposes, and perking up the nipples for feeding the kid).

They ran through 183 Germans....German-Germans in terms of their background....not immigrant-Germans.  Then they ran through twenty-five local folks....just begging for money....then twenty-five folks who were migrants or immigrants who were asking for money as well.

The choice was zero Euro to one Euro that you could donate....or just keep the money.

At this point, they had a 'standard' as tests go.

So, then they offered up the oxytocin as a nasal spray.

The folks getting the oxytocin?  They doubled their donation in the next round of tests to the immigrants.  The end-result is that the hormone made you feel more generosity than you'd normally feel.

Now, I sat and read through the whole thing.  There are a hundred ways that you could interpret the result of this test.

First, these were all Germans.  Typically.....Germans over the age of forty are very unlikely to donate money to beggars on the street.  Over the years....traveling around urban areas of Germany, you just come to note that there isn't that much compassion in the older crowd.  It's a trait that Germans dislike (at least in the older generation).  Their attitude is that you need to get a job and work.

The test folks never say the age group of these subjects (183 of them), and I would be curious about the age, or the sex of the individuals.

As for some kind of drug that doctors would hand out to make you happy?  I would question that logic.  They seem to just want to prove what exactly it does to the brain.

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