Trial reportProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Vasopressin increases human risky cooperative behavior.
Trial report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 77 citations in OpenAlex.
- Common and Distinct Neural Mechanisms Underlying Risk Seeking and Risk Aversion: Evidence From the Neuroimaging Meta-Analysis.Human brain mapping · 2025Pooled it
- Oxytocin, but not vasopressin, decreases willingness to harm others by promoting moral emotions of guilt and shame.Molecular psychiatry · 2024Trial
- Null results of oxytocin and vasopressin administration on mentalizing in a large fMRI sample: evidence from a randomized controlled trial.Psychological medicine · 2023Trial
- Oxytocin and vasopressin modulation of prisoner's dilemma strategies.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2020Trial
- Vasopressin enhances human preemptive strike in both males and females.Scientific reports · 2019Trial
- A randomized placebo-controlled pilot trial shows that intranasal vasopressin improves social deficits in children with autism.Science translational medicine · 2019Trial
- Intranasal vasopressin, but not oxytocin, decreases ethanol intake in socially housed mice.Psychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Plasma copeptin is coupled to resting-state frontoinsular-subgenual alpha dynamics in major depression with comorbid post-traumatic stress disorder.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2026Article
- Neuropeptidergic systems in psychiatric disorders.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2025Review
- The Role of Oxytocin and Vasopressin in People with Borderline Personality Disorder: A Closer Look at Adolescents.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Review
- Which Expectations to Follow: The Impact of First- and Second-Order Beliefs on Strategy Choices in a Stag Hunt Game.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Modulation of social behavior by distinct vasopressin sources.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2023Review
- Genetic and epigenetic effects on couple adjustment in context of romantic relationship: A scoping systematic review.Frontiers in genetics · 2023Article
- Rhesus monkey sociality is stable across time and linked to variation in the initiation but not receipt of prosocial behavior.American journal of primatology · 2022Article
- Arginine Vasopressin, Synaptic Plasticity, and Brain Networks.Current neuropharmacology · 2022Review
- Linking oxytocin and arginine vasopressin signaling abnormalities to social behavior impairments in Prader-Willi syndrome.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2022Review
- Socio-behavioral dysfunction in disorders of hypothalamic-pituitary involvement: The potential role of disease-induced oxytocin and vasopressin signaling deficits.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2022Review
- Leveraging a translational research approach to drive diagnostic and treatment advances for autism.Molecular psychiatry · 2022Review
- Oxytocin and vasopressin: Signalling, behavioural modulation and potential therapeutic effects.British journal of pharmacology · 2022Review
- Hormonal abnormalities in alexithymia.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The history of humankind is an epic of cooperation, which is ubiquitous across societies and increasing in scale. Much human cooperation occurs where it is risky to cooperate for mutual benefit because successful cooperation depends on a sufficient level of cooperation by others. Here we show that arginine vasopressin (AVP), a neuropeptide that mediates complex mammalian social behaviors such as pair bonding, social recognition and aggression causally increases humans' willingness to engage in risky, mutually beneficial cooperation. In two double-blind experiments, male participants received either AVP or placebo intranasally and made decisions with financial consequences in the "Stag hunt" cooperation game. AVP increases humans' willingness to cooperate. That increase is not due to an increase in the general willingness to bear risks or to altruistically help others. Using functional brain imaging, we show that, when subjects make the risky Stag choice, AVP down-regulates the BOLD signal in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), a risk-integration region, and increases the left dlPFC functional connectivity with the ventral pallidum, an AVP receptor-rich region previously associated with AVP-mediated social reward processing in mammals. These findings show a previously unidentified causal role for AVP in social approach behavior in humans, as established by animal research.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.