oxytocin doesn't make us nicer. it to makes us nicer to people who we are already nice to an exaggerates us to them contrast. how about weeks to months before? this is now entered the realm of neural plasticity, the fact the brain can change and respond to experience. for example, if you just spent the last few months mired in trauma and stress your amygdala will have grown larger. it will have formed a new connections. the circuits will be more excitable and your frontal cortex will have become more sluggish and atrophy. in other words, at the critical moment the amygdala is in a more hysterical state in the frontal cortex has that much less capacity to get there in time and say wait a second are you sure before you pull the trigger okay. separate back further, back in years, decades, how that adolescence? what's going on in adolescence is relevant to this one second of whether or not you pull the trigger. the central fact of the adolescent brain is that all of the brain is going full blast, fully mature except for

if they could spray oxytocin through the vents of costco what that would do to the economy -- oxytocin promotes pro-social behavior until you look more closely. research work shows that is what oxytocin does. makes you more co-operative and generous and charitable with people who you categorize just like you. more pro-social toward in-group members. when it comes to out-group members, makes people more xenophobic and less cooperative. a group in the netherlands showed this. they got their lab rats, college graduates from a university there and they engaged everyone in the standard process. the runaway trolley problem. okay to sacrifice one person to save five and there is a whole lot of research done on this. they established the levels people would be willing to push somebody to save five. they gave the person they were pushing on to the track a name. a third of the time the person would get a name that is like your stereotypical dutch name. a third of the time, names people have hostility toward, germans, world war ii, or people with muslims name. so do you push dirk in front of the