Ethical issues in moral and social enhancement

partners seemingly being more trustworthy than others. Consistently with previous 
studies, they found that participants who received oxytocin transferred more money 
to partners in comparison with participants in the control group. However, 
participants transferred more money to partners perceived as reliable but did not 
transfer more money to seemingly unreliable ones. This suggests that oxytocin 
administration does not increase trust when the partner appears unreliable. On the 
basis of these findings, Mikolajczak et al
 
(2010b) propose that the effects of 
oxytocin may be moderated by the perception of risk. The effects of oxytocin on 
trust have to be confirmed for other contexts, although one recent study indicates 
that oxytocin also increases trust in circumstances that do not involve monetary 
transfers—participants who received oxytocin were 44 times more trusting that 
their privacy would not be violated than participants in the control condition 

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(Mikolajczak et al. 2010a; Mikolajczak et al. 2010b). It is likely that oxytocin does 
nevertheless have some effect on our perception of how trustworthy others are. Yet 
let us make an assumption (reasonable on the basis of current evidence) that, 
generally speaking, the administration of oxytocin promotes trust—but it is unlikely 
that we would make some disastrous decisions because of this intervention. The 
research on the trust-promoting effects of oxytocin has an especially wide potential 
application given findings showing that we tend to underestimate people’s 
trustworthiness (Fetchenhauer and Dunning, 2010), and given the importance of 
trust for morally relevant actions. 
Oxytocin also seems to improve empathy, but the effect seen in research was only 
prominent for less socially proficient participants—as measured by the Autism 
Spectrum Quotient (AQ)—while no similar effect was found in the more socially 
proficient group (Bartz et al. 2010). Domes et al. (2007) found that oxytocin 
improves performance only for difficult stimuli. These findings go against the 
tempting but simplistic view that oxytocin can be used as a universal prosocial 
enhancer that can turn all people into social-cognitive experts. Instead, perhaps 
unsurprisingly given our knowledge about the context-dependency and impact of 
individual differences on the effects of both synthetic and naturally occurring 
pharmacological agents, oxytocin appears to help only some people. That is not to 
say that the effects are not substantial. In an experiment conducted by Bartz et al. 
(2007), the administration of oxytocin equalised the differences in performance of 
low and high-performance groups in such a way that the performance of