With the proliferation of neuroscience-related messages in popular media, it is more important than ever to understand their impact on the lay public. Previous research has found that people believed news stories more when irrelevant neuroscientific explanations were added. We sought to reveal whether such information could cause a change in social behavior. Specifically, based on publicized findings of the relationship between social behavior and the neurotransmitter oxytocin, we proposed that participants would accept more strangers into their in-group, or alternatively decrease in-group size, if told that there were oxytocin-based (relative to psychological construct-based) health benefits for doing so. In two tasks, participants were shown faces and written information about stimuli that could match their race, politics, and religion to varying degrees. In spite of evidence that participants processed the primes, and were sensitive to their level of similarity with stimuli, oxytocin-based priming did not alter categorization, or pupil dilation. It did not alter cross-race viewing behavior, as measured by an eye tracker, in consistent ways. Unexpectedly, pupil dilation increased when viewing stimuli of the same religion, an effect entirely related to White liberal Christians viewing other Christians. Overall, these results suggest that neuroscience information may impact some judgments, but lay people will not alter their likelihood of acceptance of strangers simply because they were primed with a neuroscience- (or more specifically, neurotransmitter-) based reason for doing so.
