A fan of Behavioral Economics, I’m also interested in Neuroeconomics. Krista Tippett’s guest this week on Speaking of Faith was Paul Zak, one of the founders of the field:

Mr. Paul Zak: Markets are human creations, and they reflect our own human nature. In the kind of decentralized economies we live in, it is based on trust and faith and belief, and that’s a good thing. I think it recognizes human dignity. It recognizes that most human beings in most situations are moral creatures and you can trust people to reciprocate most of the time and most of our societies are built around that. Civilization is built around that. Certainly democracy is built around that. […]

When trust is high and we can shake hands and do a deal, then my sense was that, you know, economies would grow faster. So delving into that for a couple years, I discovered that trust was sort of the big gun economists have been looking for. It’s really the most powerful lever we’ve found to date to understand why countries are rich or poor, partially because trust captures — when trust is high, everything in the society works well. The government works well. The social sector works well. The economic sector works well. So it’s sort of one variable that captures, hey, things are going good or things are going badly.

An empathy hormone:

Mr. Paul Zak: I just made a bunch of perhaps interesting or outlandish claims about people having sort of a moral sense. But in the last five years, we’ve begun to find the chemical basis for this. And we’ve discovered this molecule called oxytocin that lives in the human brain, and in particular human beings, it’s particularly potent at making us care about the outcomes of others. ..

And we very recently found that when we watch and we show experimental subjects an emotionally compelling video, a video of a man whose four-year-old son has terminal brain cancer, that there’s a big spike in the release of oxytocin, and people are subsequently much more generous towards a stranger. They’re more generous towards charities. So somehow this molecule in our brain has allowed us to live in large groups of people where we have something in our heads that says, “This person safe, this person not. This person, I want to be around, this person I don’t want to be around.” So it’s kind of a trust detector.

The Speaking of Faith show page has lots more.