Your whole comment goes against the very content of the blog post and is just a rehash of the “classic” view of oxytocin without anything new whatsoever.
Please explain, are you a PR employee of some vendor?

Wonderful column. My expertise is the psychology of risk perception, and I have done some reading on oxytocin and trust (not the kind you want to boost in a bar with Liquid Trust – you can the stuff with pheromones – to boost THAT kind of trust). It turns out there is a high concentration of oxytocin receptors on the amygdala, the area of the brain where fear starts. As oxytocin levels go up, the ability of the amygdala to be warry and more mistrustful goes down. I describe this in Ch. 3 of How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts. A few graphs of which are below. I wonder whether the influence of oxytocin on the amygdala might be connected with the finding of the study you write about.

TRUST

Humans are social animals. Our individual prospects depend to a significant degree on the prospects of the group(s) to which we belong, and how well we get along with the group(s). Survival means being acutely sensitive to who is on our side and who is not. So it isn’t surprising that trust matters so much to how we go about protecting ourselves. And it isn’t surprising to find the instinct for trust rooted deep in the brain.
Few forms of trust are more basic than that between a newborn and its mother. Scientists have discovered that this relationship is strengthened by the hormone oxytocin, released when the baby stares up at mom while breast feeding. Staring lovingly at your boyfriend or girlfriend can trigger their release of oxytocin too, as can warm physical contact like touching and hugging. (Levels increase during sex and peak at orgasm, which may help explain the age-old question “But will you love me in the morning, when your oxytocin levels have dropped?”) Oxytocin reduces stress in arguing couples, helps us recognize faces, even helps us look at a face (in fact, just a pair of eyes) and identify the mood that person is in. The stuff is magic.
Based on the evidence that oxytocin is involved in social bonding, researchers tested its impact on trust.
A Risk Quiz; Let’s say you are one of the volunteers to whom researchers gave $100, and this option: you can either keep the money, or give it to an anonymous trustee who will either invest it and double it to $200 and return half of the extra hundred bucks to you–$50–or keep all the money for herself. So you can either increase your money by 50%, or lose it all. What would you do? Would you trust that anonymous trustee? (Remember Loss Aversion from Chapter Two, where in a similar experiment most people decided to avoid the gamble and take the sure cash.)
An hour before the start of this actual experiment, half the volunteers were given a sniff of oxytocin. The other sniffed a placebo. The oxytocin-exposed group was much more trusting. More volunteers who had sniffed the hormone trusted the anonymous investors and gambled with their money.5
A later experiment by another group took it a step further. This time the volunteers were told how they did, and in half of the cases, they learned that the trustee had burned them and kept the money. The volunteers who were burned were asked whether they wanted to try again. What would you do? This would be like getting that spam from the Nigerian Prince a second time and sending him $5,000 again, right?
Half the group of burned volunteers got a whiff of Eau de Oxytocin, half got a sniff of Eau de Placebo. Those who sniffed the oxytocin were more trusting and ready to invest with an anonymous trustee a second time than were the placebo-exposed subjects. And when they were asked “Do you want to try this again?” the oxytocin-treated volunteers responded more quickly than the volunteers who hadn’t gotten the nose full of Trust Spray.6
Like I said, it’s amazing stuff. And it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it affects that amazing part of your brain so intimately involved in keeping you safe…the amygdala. Remember, trust has a lot to do with survival among social animals who depend on each other for safety and protection. Show someone an untrustworthy face, and the amygdala is one of two areas that become more active than anywhere else in the brain.7 It is apparently programmed for reading trust just as it is for snakes or spiders.
But we have to be just as good at recognizing who we can trust, so the system needs fine-tuned control. That’s apparently where oxytocin comes in. The amygdala, that critical organ for our biological risk response, has a high concentration of receptors for oxytocin. In the second set of those gambling experiments with the volunteers and the trustees, researchers used fMRI to watch the brains of the volunteers as they made their choices. As the levels of oxytocin in the brain went up compared with the placebo group, activity in the amygdala went down! Oxytocin diminishes the amygdala’s ability to send out the message “Warning! Warning! I don’t trust this guy.”
These fundamental biological underpinnings deep in the self-preservation systems of the brain suggest why trust plays such a powerful part in our risk response. As we learned from how the public reacted to the way the governments in Japan and Germany handled the outbreak of Mad Cow disease.