Being Monogamous and Altruistic Is Driven by Oxytocin in the Brain

The neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin drive altruistic punishment, social bonding and monogamy

Prairie vole family. Photo by Todd H. Ahern.

The faithful prairie vole and the promiscuous montane vole

Let me introduce you to the prairie vole, a small mammal that has attracted considerable attention in scientific circles. They are rodents with short tails and small ears that are found in North America, from west of the Rockies to east of Appalachia. What is so notorious about them is that they are strictly monogamous: a male and a female form a bond for life.

However, a very close cousin of the prairie vole, the montane vole, is completely promiscuous. Males mate with multiple females if they can. Females become fertile in the proximity of males.

Oxytocin induces monogamy

Some scientists decided to find out how the brain of the prairie vole is different from that of the montane vole (Young et al., 2011). They found that female prairie voles have more oxytocin and oxytocin receptors in the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala, which are areas of the brain important in emotions and decision-making.

Oxytocin was first recognized as the peptide that induces uterine contractions during labor. More recently, it has been shown to be crucial for many forms of social bonding. For example, it increases in the blood when a dog is being petted, in both the dog and the human!

Back to our friends the voles… scientists genetically modified montane voles by increasing the production of oxytocin in the brain. These montane voles became as monogamous as their cousins the prairie voles.

What about the male voles? Well, in them monogamous behavior seems to be determined by another peptide, vasopressin (Gobrogge et al., 2009; Donaldson et al., 2010), which is quite similar to oxytocin.

Altruistic punishment

Oxytocin also attracted the attention of researchers of a totally unrelated field: economics.

Some unconventional economists decided to put to the test a basic belief of capitalism: that market decisions are rational. They found that they are not. Human transactions are based more on trust and empathy that on dispassionate decisions on what is to lose and what is to gain.

For example, in all cultures, people engage in something called altruistic punishment (Fehr and Gachter, 2002): they will go at great length to punish individuals that they perceive as being unfair and untrustworthy.

The ultimatum game

One way they determined this was with an experiment called the ultimatum game.

There are two players. Player one is given a sum of money, say $10, of which he has to offer a certain amount to player 2. If player 2 takes the offer, both get to keep the agreed amount of money. However, if player 2 rejects to offer, both of them lose the money.

The results of the ultimatum game are consistent between people of all sexes, religions and cultures. Below a certain amount (about $3-4 if the total amount is $10), player 2 decides that player 1 is not being fair and rejects the offer. That means that he is willing to lose 2, 3 or even 4 bucks to punish player 1 for being greedy. That’s why this is called “altruistic punishment”.

When levels of oxytocin were increased, player 1 tended to be more generous in his monetary offers.

Testosterone did the opposite of oxytocin (Burnham, 2007; Zak et al., 2009; Dreher et al., 2016). In fact, men are more inclined to altruistic punishment than women (Zheng et al., 2017).

The female sex hormone estradiol had more complex effects. When offers in the ultimatum game were framed as fair, estradiol increases acceptance in men but reduced acceptance in women (Coenjaerts et al., 2021).

Oxytocin, vasopressin and social bonding

Oxytocin and vasopressin are now called the social hormones because they strongly influence social behaviors like bonding, trust and empathy (Stein, 2009).

However, we should not fall into the simplistic belief that oxytocin makes us good. It has been observed that this neuropeptide is involved in some nasty human behaviors, like xenophobia and intolerance. This is because oxytocin increases both bonding with the members of our group and exclusion of anybody perceived as a stranger (Radke and de Bruijn, 2012).

Monogamy entails both feeling close to our spouse and rejecting member of the opposite sex that are not our spouse: bonding and exclusion.

On the other hand, the role of vasopressin in monogamy may be related with possessiveness and territoriality: the male perceives the female as part of his territory and defends her as such.

Likewise, altruistic punishment has a good side - like deterring crime-, and a bad side -like road rage and other confrontation when we think that somebody is taking advantage of us.

References

1. Burnham TC (2007) High-testosterone men reject low ultimatum game offers. Proceedings Biological sciences 274:2327-2330.

2. Coenjaerts M, Pape F, Santoso V, Grau F, Stoffel-Wagner B, Philipsen A, Schultz J, Hurlemann R, Scheele D (2021) Sex differences in economic decision-making: Exogenous estradiol has opposing effects on fairness framing in women and men. European neuropsychopharmacology : the journal of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology 50:46-54.

3. Donaldson ZR, Spiegel L, Young LJ (2010) Central vasopressin V1a receptor activation is independently necessary for both partner preference formation and expression in socially monogamous male prairie voles. Behav Neurosci 124:159-163.

4. Dreher JC, Dunne S, Pazderska A, Frodl T, Nolan JJ, O'Doherty JP (2016) Testosterone causes both prosocial and antisocial status-enhancing behaviors in human males. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 113:11633-11638.

5. Fehr E, Gachter S (2002) Altruistic punishment in humans. Nature 415:137-140.

6. Gobrogge KL, Liu Y, Young LJ, Wang Z (2009) Anterior hypothalamic vasopressin regulates pair-bonding and drug-induced aggression in a monogamous rodent. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 106:19144-19149.

7. Radke S, de Bruijn ER (2012) The other side of the coin: oxytocin decreases the adherence to fairness norms. Frontiers in human neuroscience 6:193.

8. Stein DJ (2009) Oxytocin and vasopressin: social neuropeptides. CNS spectrums 14:602-606.

9. Young KA, Gobrogge KL, Liu Y, Wang Z (2011) The neurobiology of pair bonding: insights from a socially monogamous rodent. Front Neuroendocrinol 32:53-69.

10. Zak PJ, Kurzban R, Ahmadi S, Swerdloff RS, Park J, Efremidze L, Redwine K, Morgan K, Matzner W (2009) Testosterone administration decreases generosity in the ultimatum game. PLoS One 4:e8330.

11. Zheng L, Ning R, Li L, Wei C, Cheng X, Zhou C, Guo X (2017) Gender Differences in Behavioral and Neural Responses to Unfairness Under Social Pressure. Scientific reports 7:13498.