Experiments With Oxytocin On Altruism Toward Refugees

A reader emailed this over. It sounds ominous, but I am not afraid.

Never before have individuals had to adapt to social environments defined by such magnitudes of ethnic diversity and cultural differentiation. However, neurobiological evidence informing about strategies to reduce xenophobic sentiment and foster altruistic cooperation with outsiders is scarce. In a series of experiments settled in the context of the current refugee crisis, we tested the propensity of 183 Caucasian participants to make donations to people in need, half of whom were refugees (outgroup) and half of whom were natives (ingroup). Participants scoring low on xenophobic attitudes exhibited an altruistic preference for the outgroup, which further increased after nasal delivery of the neuropeptide oxytocin. In contrast, participants with higher levels of xenophobia generally failed to exhibit enhanced altruism toward the outgroup. This tendency was only countered by pairing oxytocin with peer-derived altruistic norms, resulting in a 74% increase in refugee-directed donations. Collectively, these findings reveal the underlying sociobiological conditions associated with outgroup-directed altruism by showing that charitable social cues co-occurring with enhanced activity of the oxytocin system reduce the effects of xenophobia by facilitating prosocial behavior toward refugees.

I read this, and keep thinking of an old friend I had. When he was 19, he took a job which paired him off with a really crazy guy. They were basically on their own each day, going from empty rich person’s house to empty rich person’s house doing service stuff. They’d only stop by a warehouse for supplies and a quick check-in each day with the boss, to get instructions and make sure their jobs were being done.

Each Friday they got their paychecks, and they promptly blew all of it on giant piles of Cocaine. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights were wild, and he said they were eager to get everyone they met to have some coke with them. In the euphoria, even strangers would be urged, here, have a line! It was like everyone was their best friend. I am struck by the attitude of liberals, and how similar their attitudes are to those laden with one of the most powerful dopamine agonists in the world coursing through their blood.

By Monday, the supply was getting thin, and my buddy and his friend began to horde and ration what little they had left. By Wednesday they were in foul moods and accusing each other of holding out and hiding a stash that should by rights be shared. Thursday was spent alternating between cursing each other for not keeping some to share and trying to find any hidden away that could be stolen from each other. Every Friday the cycle repeated.

By the time I had met my friend, he was off the coke, and he was easy to get along with all the time.

What I see in this experiment are social scientists who don’t really understand endocrinology, and as a result they see it as the province of Merlin-like sorcerers who can make anything happen. They want that easy path to simply give everybody a snort of something, and change everything forever.

Endocrinology, even (or especially) neuroendocrinology doesn’t work that way. Even if they found a superactive-analog of “Leftist Rabbit Brain Hormone” or LRBH, and in experiments like this it made every college kid give away all their money to the foreigners and ask to be sodomized, it would never work in real life.

Give it on Friday in limitless amounts, and by Monday the effects would be getting blunted by feedback inhibition. By next Friday, the subjects would be getting really desensitized to it, and by a week later, they would need the full dose just to keep from killing everyone within eyesight and taking all their shit. And things would deteriorate from there.

Receptor genes would scale back transcription, endogenous production of the natural peptide would plummet, and the moment the dosage schedule was interrupted, you would have The Walking Dead, only instead of being brain-dead and physically handicapped, the zombies would be amped up on rage, lighting fast, and really smart and clever. If the Walking dead is K-selection, the reality would be K-selection to the millionth power.

The world is pretty well engineered to never allow the imposition of leftist rabbitry for too long. K-selection will come back, and its strength will be proportional to how long its return was delayed. It is practically a natural law.

Spread r/K Theory, because you can’t fight the K