76. The Weaponization of Vasopressin
Social media is on fire with false or unproven claims about the effects of Vasopressin on Human Behavior. This in turn is leading to influencer content creation encouraging people to harm each other.
Social Media Weaponization of Vasopressin
I have noticed that YouTube has begun flooding me with articles about how lay people can use Vasopressin (also known as Anti Diuretic Hormone) to control the people around them. The YT algorithm clearly knows I have interest in the field of Endocrinology (Hormones) that I write expert articles about, so it suggests this content. This seemed both odd and alarming to me, for reasons I will explain in depth in this article.
If I type “Vasopressin” into the search field in YouTube I will get a mix of video suggestions on physiology and “Vasopressin Bonding”. Some of these videos are produced by people claiming they are doctors or have PhDs. This can lead people to assume the associated content is factual and reliable. Even if the person doesn’t make such claims, they may wear a suit and glasses and speak authoritatively in an attempt to convince the viewer that they are credible.
The first problem here is a problem across all social media: Misinformation is being spread on social media, great educational information is being spread on social media, harmless content is being spread on social media, and harmful content is being spread on social media. Unless you are yourself an expert, it will be very difficult for you to tell the difference between these four things.
The second problem is more specific to Vasopressin: influencers are telling people that if they apply the techniques they advocate for, they can manipulate and mind control (perhaps permanently) the people around them. Worse still, this amazing super power often requires that you harm those people to get the effect they promote. Clearly this sort of messaging will find a welcome audience in the curious, the opportunistic, and the malicious. Almost everyone watching YT is in at least one of these categories.
If I type “Vasopressin Bonding” into the search field I get some very interesting results. Again, some of the people making these videos claim to be various flavors of doctor. One, Dr. Thomas Insel, is actually a respected neuroscientist. The video, which is admittedly 14 years old, does warn that it is a bit too early to draw conclusions about human behavior from animal research, but still conflates Vasopressin with Oxytocin and suggests that the two have similar effects in humans, which is not true. Nothing he says is false, but it is presented in a potentially misleading context.
Another (also 14 years old) video is from a Dr. Larry Young (recently died of a heart attack at age 56) who was a psychiatrist studying prairie voles (a small wild rodent about the size of a mouse). In the video he talks about the mating habits of “individuals”, conflates oxytocin and vasopressin, and doesn’t make it clear he is strictly talking about animal research and there is no evidence (then or now) that this applies to humans.
From there the suggested videos degrade rapidly, with titles like “Why is he not bonding during sex?” and “How to bond him to you during sex”. This sort of click bait is exploitative and sends out harmful misinformation. If you’ve ever played “telephone”, where you put 10 people in a line and say something in the ear of the first person, then have them whisper the same thing to the next person in the line, it’s always great for a laugh when you ask the last person what the message was, and find out it’s completely different compared to the original message. This is exactly what is happening.
There is an explosion of content on all social media where influencers talk about dating, love, marriage, avoiding dating/love/marriage, and a slew of related misandrist and misogynistic content. Many of these influencers are now trying to claim that vasopressin proves whatever agenda/ideology they are promoting.
What is Vasopressin?
Vasopressin is also known as Anti Diuretic Hormone (ADH). ADH does exactly what it sounds like it does, if you know some Latin: It inhibits (Anti) urine production (Diuretic) and it is a Hormone, which means it is released under certain conditions and floats around temporarily (usually for less than an hour). During this time it will have affects on any cells that have the appropriate receptors that the hormone can dock with. That cell will have no way of knowing why ADH is visiting it and the cell will just do what it is instructed to do when exposed to ADH.
Hormones (and the Endocrine system in general) allow blanket instructions to be given to much or most of your body simultaneously without the fatigue that would result if your central nervous system had to send out all those messages. This “signal” ramps up slowly and disappears slowly, and generally isn’t targeted to a specific part of the body. Thus a Hormone is much less precise than a command sent via your nervous system.
I have previously published a paper suggesting that ADH played a major role in some high profile gamer deaths: I’m Dying to Play [48, 2017]. I discuss this and many other hormones and how they affect gamers when they play in The Physiology of Gaming [59, 2018].
As described in the aforementioned papers, ADH release can be promoted by adrenal axis activity, so “being stressed” can increase the chances of it being released. ADH is not itself a “stress hormone” though, so influencers trying to trigger the release of it by putting the the object of their mind control plans under stress is not how it works. Getting them hot or dehydrated would be a lot more effective, but as I will explain this is all in vain since the research never indicated that this would work as these people intend.
The Research
In order to figure out what was going on after I started getting these sorts of videos in my YT suggestions, I had to “research the research”. Reading these sorts of papers isn’t all that entertaining, even for endocrinologists. What immediately got my attention was that all of the related research on ADH and human behavior was actually not done on humans. It was done on animals. Drawing conclusions from animal research and applying it to humans is an endeavour fraught with peril.
Humans are extremely complicated and sophisticated in their social behavior. Having personally done this sort of animal research, I was disappointed to find out just how inaccurate it is, and this made me regret the thousands of animals that were killed in just one study. Thus two very obvious conclusions were reached by me that I think all scientists working with animals should consider:
Your results will be extremely inaccurate if you attempt to apply them to humans,
You better have a REALLY good reason to kill so many animals for “research”.
Of course there are some really good reasons why you would ignore the above advice:
You are in a hurry
You don’t care about accuracy
You aren’t qualified to do your research on human behavior on actual humans.
When you get an academic position at a university or attached research institute you are paid to produce papers. Sort of like this paper except that I’ve never been paid for a research paper, and that means I can take my time and not publish anything that will come back to haunt me later. My body of work has aged quite well. Being under a deadline to produce a paper means you may have to cut corners. You may have to fudge data. You may have to come up with a wildly inaccurate but click-bait-worthy conclusion if your career is floundering or your employers need something they can sell to justify your employment.
Animal research is much much easier to get permission to do, versus human research. Animal research has the added benefit of animal death or mutilation being totally fine and not leading to regulatory responses or lawsuits. Animals will always comply with your schedule. They are in a constant state of trauma from being caged anyways (which distorts or invalidates your data by stimulating the adrenal axis) so this is not a concern.
While we have had successful and really profound research on the effects of oxytocin on human behavior, this sort of research is extraordinarily complicated. Not only does it require humans, but Oxytocin has a blood half life of 3 to 5 minutes. Vasopressin has a serum half life of 10 to 35 minutes. Thus animal research on vasopressin is likely two orders of magnitude (100 times) easier to do. So if you can claim that both types of research might have the same result, and one is easy enough for you to do but the other isn’t, then of course you will want to do the research that is within your skill level.
In addition to my own literary research on the research, I contacted my colleague Dr. Paul Zak, a fellow neuroeconomist, who has done oxytocin research on humans for decades. I asked him about the quality of research on vasopressin and human behavior, especially in regards to the animal research. He was pleased that I was approaching the research sceptically and confirmed my suspicions that none of the cited research results on animals had been reproduced in humans. He had personally attempted to reproduce this research (but on humans) and it only served to contradict the animal research.
Concerns and Conclusion
Social media click bait encouraging people (especially women) to threaten people they desire sexually (usually men) in order to force them to love them in return is not going to work. Threatening people is not a great way to get them to like or even love you. What it will do is increase the amount of threat and fear generated by social media, and further degrade global human mental wellness. Reaction videos will vilify the people doing this (target audience: women) which will create positive feedback loops (for hostile behavior) which could get out of hand quickly.
Social media platforms and game developers themselves have made it clear that they are not adverse to harming their consumers if it will generate more revenue. If they become convinced that they can get gamers to love them by threatening them, it’s going to happen. As I’ve suggested for the last 10 years in my papers, it’s only a matter of time before social media platforms and AAA game developers hire neuroscientists en mass. Just like 10 years before that I suggested that game economists would become necessary.
Dr. Insel, who I mentioned early in this paper, isn’t working at a university now. He was hired by Google. He’s a neuroscientist of some repute. I trust he will give Google good advice on how to modify the behavior of Google’s customers. But random people are going to be hired to do this who will not have Dr. Insel’s experience, qualifications, or ethical standards.
Now in mid 2024 I am racing to complete the design of my first Game as a Service (GaaS) that includes what I would describe as “Oxytocin Loops” in the meta design. It’s called REVENGE and should be out on Steam and Epic stores before the end of the year. My hope is that it will create a much better experience for gamers compared to the much more harmful dopamine loops that have taken over the industry since I first described them in a paper 10 years ago.
I would expect that within the next 10 years someone will try to get me to make a game with “Vasopressin Loops”. I will of course decline and point them to this and other articles. But someone will say yes and consumers will be harmed. This is my fear and I hope this prediction does not come true.