Trial reportProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Oxytocin-enforced norm compliance reduces xenophobic outgroup rejection.
Trial report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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
20 citing papers in PubMed, 63 citations in OpenAlex.
- Eye-Tracking Reveals a Role of Oxytocin in Attention Allocation Towards Familiar Faces.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2021Trial
- Early life adversity shapes neural and behavioural responses to oxytocin during altruistic decision-making.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Companion animals support human wellbeing and health: evolutionary, behavioral and physiological contexts.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Close encounters of the friendly kind: pacific between-group interactions in primates.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Oxytocin activity is not linked to out-group prosociality in wild bonobos.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Intranasal oxytocin interacts with testosterone reactivity to modulate parochial altruism.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Detection, processing and reinforcement of social cues: regulation by the oxytocin system.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2023Review
- Brain trust.Comprehensive psychoneuroendocrinology · 2023Review
- Wolf-Dog-Human: Companionship Based on Common Social Tools.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Review
- Oxytocin has 'tend-and-defend' functionality in group conflict across social vertebrates.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Oxytocin and the Neurobiology of Prosocial Behavior.The Neuroscientist : a review journal bringing neurobiology, neurology and psychiatry · 2021Review
- Effects of Oxytocin on Social Comparisons in Intergroup Situations.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- Intranasal oxytocin drives coordinated social approach.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Brain oxytocin: how puzzle stones from animal studies translate into psychiatry.Molecular psychiatry · 2021Review
- Role of oxytocin in the control of stress and food intake.Journal of neuroendocrinology · 2019Review
- [Oxytocin in schizophrenia : Evidence for an etiological and therapeutic relevance of the social neuromodulator].Der Nervenarzt · 2019Review
- Oxytocin Facilitates Social Learning by Promoting Conformity to Trusted Individuals.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2019Review
- Trust Games and Beyond.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2019Review
- Oxytocin- and arginine vasopressin-containing fibers in the cortex of humans, chimpanzees, and rhesus macaques.American journal of primatology · 2018Article
- Psychopathy to Altruism: Neurobiology of the Selfish-Selfless Spectrum.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Review
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 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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.
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What OpenQuestion holds
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.