Giving peace a chance: oxytocin increases empathy to pain in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Oxytocin in this randomized controlled trial publication.

Investigating the mechanism underlying the emotional reactions of Jewish Israeli participants toward the pain experienced by Palestinians in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict affords a natural experiment that allows them to examine the role of neurohormones in emotion sensitivity across conflicting social groups.

Why It Was Studied

Studies have argued that empathy to the pain of out-group members is largely diminished by "in-group empathy bias".

In a double-blind placebo-controlled within-subject crossover design, Israeli Jewish participants were asked to report their empathy to the pain of in-group (Jewish), neutral out-group (European), and adversary out-group (Palestinian) members.

Who Took Part

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were young adults, adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled and crossover study.

The participants were allocated by chance, so the Oxytocin group and the comparison group should start out alike.

Blinding on both sides kept the participants and researchers unaware of who received Oxytocin.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Oxytocin group a baseline to be compared against.

Each person switched between Oxytocin and the comparison at some point, usually with a gap in between.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Analysis of Variance, Arabs, Empathy, Israel, Jews, Oxytocin and Pain.

Author keywords: Inter-group dynamics and Intractable conflict.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Oxytocin.

The publication is from 2013 (Psychoneuroendocrinology), a journal based in England.

More context: the Oxytocin compound page, all human trials.