Book description
Human beings can be so compassionate. They can also be shockingly
cruel. What if there was a master control for human behaviour? Switch
it on and people are loving and generous. Switch it off and they
revert to violence and greed. Pioneering neuroeconomist Paul J. Zak
has discovered just such a master switch: a molecule in the human brain.
Zak's colleagues call him Dr Love. They also call him the vampire
economist. He and his research team have travelled from his laboratory
in California to the jungles of Papua new Guinea via a summer garden
in Devon, taking blood from people as they attend a wedding, make
decisions with money, play football on the field, even jump from an
aeroplane. Their experiments to measure a chemical in the bloodstream
called oxytocin reveal the answers to those mysteries about why we
make the decisions we do: why we are sometimes rational, at other
times irrational; why men cheat more than women; how the moral
molecule operates in the market place, and most importantly, once we
understand the moral molecule, how we can consciously use it to make
our lives better.
Paul Zak is the founding Director of the Centre for Neuroeconomics
Studies and Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University. He
has degrees in mathematics and economics from San Diego State
University, a Ph. D. in economics from University of Pennsylvania, and
post-doctoral training in neuroimaging from Harvard. Professor Zak is an
expert in neuroeconomics, a field he helped create, and is a recognised
expert in oxytocin.
