Peer Pressure - Hormonal Basis??

Oxytocin is a hormone that seems to promote social co-operation. There have been some suggestions that it would be useful in certain group activities. But a recent study has added a caution to those ideas.

Using college students, researchers found that when a group was given oxytocin, and then asked to report results of a guessing test where the percentage of correct responses benefited the entire group.

When compared with a group who were not given the hormone, the oxytocin group lied almost twice as often as the control group.

This might have implications as to why some people would perform activities they would not normally do when faced with peer pressure. Perhaps evolution has provided a hormonal basis for group co-operation!