There is.

We're the only creatures

with fully developed moral sentiments.

We're obsessed with morality as social creatures.

We need to know why people are doing what they're doing.

And I personally am obsessed with morality.

It was all due to this woman,

Sister Mary Marastela,

also known as my mom.

As an altar boy, I breathed in a lot of incense,

and I learned to say phrases in Latin,

but I also had time to think

about whether my mother's top-down morality

applied to everybody.

I saw that people who were religious and non-religious

were equally obsessed with morality.

I thought, maybe there's some earthly basis

for moral decisions.

But I wanted to go further

than to say our brains make us moral.

I want to know if there's a chemistry of morality.

I want to know

if there was a moral molecule.

After 10 years of experiments,

I found it.

Would you like to see it? I brought some with me.

This little syringe

contains the moral molecule.

(Laughter)

It's called oxytocin.

So oxytocin is a simple and ancient molecule

found only in mammals.

In rodents, it was known

to make mothers care for their offspring,

and in some creatures,

allowed for toleration of burrowmates.

But in humans, it was only known

to facilitate birth and breastfeeding in women,

and is released by both sexes during sex.

So I had this idea that oxytocin might be the moral molecule.

I did what most of us do -- I tried it on some colleagues.

One of them told me,

"Paul, that is the world's stupidist idea.

It is," he said, "only a female molecule.

It can't be that important."

But I countered, "Well men's brains make this too.

There must be a reason why."

But he was right, it was a stupid idea.

But it was testably stupid.

In other words, I thought I could design an experiment

to see if oxytocin made people moral.

Turns out it wasn't so easy.

First of all, oxytocin is a shy molecule.

Baseline levels are near zero,

without some stimulus to cause its release.

And when it's produced, it has a three-minute half-life,

and degrades rapidly at room temperature.

So this experiment would have to cause a surge of oxytocin,

have to grab it fast and keep it cold.

I think I can do that.

Now luckily, oxytocin is produced

both in the brain and in the blood,

so I could do this experiment without learning neurosurgery.

Then I had to measure morality.

So taking on Morality with a capital M is a huge project.

So I started smaller.

I studied one single virtue:

trustworthiness.

Why? I had shown in the early 2000s

that countries with a higher proportion of trustworthy people

are more prosperous.

So in these countries, more economic transactions occur

and more wealth is created,

alleviating poverty.

So poor countries are by and large low trust countries.

So if I understood the chemistry of trustworthiness,

I might help alleviate poverty.

But I'm also a skeptic.

I don't want to just ask people, "Are you trustworthy?"

So instead I use

the Jerry Maguire approach to research.

If you're so virtuous,

show me the money.

So what we do in my lab

is we tempt people with virtue and vice by using money.

Let me show you how we do that.

So we recruit some people for an experiment.

They all get $10 if they agree to show up.

We give them lots of instruction, and we never ever deceive them.

Then we match them in pairs by computer.

And in that pair, one person gets a message saying,

"Do you want to give up some of your $10

you earned for being here

and ship it to someone else in the lab?"

The trick is you can't see them,

you can't talk to them.

You only do it one time.

Now whatever you give up

gets tripled in the other person's account.

You're going to make them a lot wealthier.

And they get a message by computer saying

person one sent you this amount of money.

Do you want to keep it all,

or do you want to send some amount back?

So think about this experiment for minute.

You're going to sit on these hard chairs for an hour and a half.

Some mad scientist is going to jab your arm with a needle

and take four tubes of blood.

And now you want me to give up this money and ship it to a stranger?

So this was the birth of vampire economics.

Make a decision and give me some blood.

So in fact, experimental economists

had run this test around the world,

and for much higher stakes,

and the consensus view

was that the measure from the first person to the second was a measure of trust,

and the transfer from the second person back to the first

measured trustworthiness.

But in fact, economists were flummoxed

on why the second person would ever return any money.

They assumed money is good,

why not keep it all?

That's not what we found.

We found 90 percent of the first decision-makers sent money,

and of those who received money,

95 percent returned some of it.

But why?

Well by measuring oxytocin

we found that the more money the second person received,

the more their brain produced oxytocin,

and the more oxytocin on board,

the more money they returned.

So we have a biology of trustworthiness.

But wait. What's wrong with this experiment?

Two things.

One is that nothing in the body happens in isolation.

So we measured nine other molecules that interact with oxytocin,

but they didn't have any effect.

But the second is

that I still only had this indirect relationship

between oxytocin and trustworthiness.

I didn't know for sure

oxytocin caused trustworthiness.

So to make the experiment,

I knew I'd have to go into the brain

and manipulate oxytocin directly.

I used everything short of a drill

to get oxytocin into my own brain.

And I found I could do it

with a nasal inhaler.

So along with colleagues in Zurich,

we put 200 men on oxytocin or placebo,

had that same trust test with money,

and we found that those on oxytocin not only showed more trust,

we can more than double the number of people

who sent all their money to a stranger --

all without altering mood or cognition.

So oxytocin is the trust molecule,

but is it the moral molecule?

Using the oxytocin inhaler,

we ran more studies.

We showed that oxytocin infusion

increases generosity

in unilateral monetary transfers

by 80 percent.

We showed it increases donations to charity

by 50 percent.

We've also investigated

non-pharmacologic ways to raise oxytocin.

These include massage,

dancing and praying.

Yes, my mom was happy about that last one.

And whenever we raise oxytocin,

people willingly open up their wallets

and share money with strangers.

But why do they do this?

What does it feel like

when your brain is flooded with oxytocin?

To investigate this question, we ran an experiment

where we had people watch a video

of a father and his four year-old son,

and his son has terminal brain cancer.

After they watched the video, we had them rate their feelings

and took blood before and after to measure oxytocin.

The change in oxytocin

predicted their feelings of empathy.

So it's empathy

that makes us connect to other people.

It's empathy that makes us help other people.

It's empathy that makes us moral.

Now this idea is not new.

A then unknown philosopher named Adam Smith

wrote a book in 1759

called "The Theory of Moral Sentiments."

In this book, Smith argued

that we are moral creatures, not because of a top-down reason,

but for a bottom-up reason.

He said we're social creatures,

so we share the emotions of others.

So if I do something that hurts you, I feel that pain.

So I tend to avoid that.

If I do something that makes you happy, I get to share your joy.

So I tend to do those things.

Now this is the same Adam Smith who, 17 years later,

would write a little book called "The Wealth of Nations" --

the founding document of economics.

But he was, in fact, a moral philosopher,

and he was right on why we're moral.

I just found the molecule behind it.

But knowing that molecule is valuable,

because it tells us how to turn up this behavior

and what turns it off.

In particular, it tells us

why we see immorality.

So to investigate immorality,

let me bring you back now to 1980.

I'm working at a gas station

on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, California.

You sit in a gas station all day,

you see lots of morality and immorality, let me tell you.

So one Sunday afternoon, a man walks into my cashier's booth

with this beautiful jewelry box.

Opens it up and there's a pearl necklace inside.

And he said, "Hey, I was in the men's room.

I just found this. What do you think we should do with it?"

"I don't know, put it in the lost and found."

"Well this is very valuable.

We have to find the owner for this." I said, "Yea."

So we're trying to decide what to do with this,

and the phone rings.

And a man says very excitedly,

"I was in your gas station a while ago,

and I bought this jewelry for my wife, and I can't find it."

I said, "Pearl necklace?" "Yeah."

"Hey, a guy just found it."

"Oh, you're saving my life. Here's my phone number.

Tell that guy to wait half an hour.

I'll be there and I'll give him a $200 reward."

Great, so I tell the guy, "Look, relax.

Get yourself a fat reward. Life's good."

He said, "I can't do it.

I have this job interview in Galena in 15 minutes,

and I need this job, I've got to go."

Again he asked me, "What do you think we should do?"

I'm in high school. I have no idea.

So I said, "I'll hold it for you."

He said, "You know, you've been so nice, let's split the reward."

I'll give you the jewelry, you give me a hundred dollars,

and when the guy comes ... "

You see it. I was conned.

So this is a classic con called the pigeon drop,

and I was the pigeon.

So the way many cons work

is not that the conman gets the victim to trust him,

it's that he shows he trusts the victim.