Prof. Shihui Han’s lab published a paper in Neuropsychopharmacology to reveal opposing oxytocin effects on inter-group cooperative behavior in intuitive and reflective minds. People often favor ingroup over outgroup members when choosing to cooperate. Such ingroup-favored cooperation ispromoted by oxytocin — a neuropeptide that facilitates social cognition and has emerged as a pharmacological target for treatments of social functioning deficits. This study applied a dual-process model to investigate whether and how intuitive and reflective cognitive styles affect the oxytocin-motivated ingroup-favoritism in cooperation. Oxytocin effects on ingroup-favoritism were tested using in a double blind, placebo-controlled between-subjects design where cognitive processing (intuition vs. reflection) was experimentally manipulated in healthy Chinese males (n="150)." This experimental manipulation was supplemented with an individual difference analysis by assessing participants’ natural inclination toward intuition or reflection in daily-life. It was found that intranasal administration of oxytocin (vs. placebo) increased ingroup-favoritism among participants primed to be intuitive or those who preferred intuition in daily life. In contrast, oxytocin decreasedingroup-favoritism in participants primed to rely on reflective thinking or those who preferred reflective decision-making in daily life. These findings demonstrate that oxytocin plays distinct functional roles when different cognitive styles (i.e., intuition vs. reflection) are promoted during social cooperation in a group situation. These findings have implications for oxytocin pharmacotherapy of social dysfunction, i.e., an individual's cognitive style influences whether oxytocin effects on social functioning are facilitative, debilitative, or null. This study was done in cooperation with Dr. Yina Ma at Lieber Institute for Brain Development.

Ma, Y., Liu, Y., Rand, D., Heatherton, T., Han, S. (2015). Opposing oxytocin effects on inter-groupcooperative behavior in intuitive and reflective minds.  Neuropsychopharmacology .doi:10.1038/npp.2015.87