Ed Yong of Discover Magazine’s Not Exactly Rocket Science blog has… discouraging news for abstinence-loving social “biologists” who hang their hats on oxytocin as a reason women should be virgins until marriage and monogamous thereafter. A psychology researcher at UCSB, Heejung Kim, has some interesting preliminary results showing that the human oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) doesn’t just vary in between genetically diverse people*, and not only does it sometimes produce opposite responses in genetically diverse people but, uh oh!, even among genetically homogenous people it can produce different results if they’re affected by different cultural upbringing! Definitely not what abstinence ‘wingers are going to want to hear.
(Emphasis mine.)
The OXTR gene exerts its influence against the background of these contrasting cultural conventions. Distressed Americans with one or more copies of the G version were more likely to seek emotional support from their friends, compared to those with two copies of the A version. But for the Koreans, the opposite was true – G carriers were less likely to look for support among their peers in times of need (although this particular trend was not statistically significant). In both cases, the G carriers were more sensitive to the social conventions of their own cultures. But the differences between these conventions led to different behaviour.
And in a further example of the influence of the environment, Kim only found this pattern among people who were experiencing a lot of stress. In the low stress group, she found that Americans were indeed more likely to seek emotional support than Koreans, but their OXTR gene had no bearing on their choices.
Of course, Koreans and Americans differ not just in their cultures, but in their genes (including many others beyond OXTR). To account for that, Kim also worked with a small group of 32 Korean-Americans who were born and raised in the US, but were genetically Korean. Kim found that the link between OXTR and emotional support among these volunteers was much closer to the culturally similar Americans than the genetically similar Koreans.
Never mind that the plain old biochemistry says no dice to the “oxytocin exhaustion” theory. And really never mind that there’s also genetic variation in homogenous populations. Those are old school, common sense refutations of the “oxytocin exhaustion” theory of abstinence.
Although it’s a small-scale study which requires much larger samples to verify, he new-school refutations implied by this study would be (duh!) that like a lot of other nominally “behavior-controlling” genes, culture influences expression.
Call it a wild-assed guess here but I’m… pretty confident that you wanted to conduct an experiment on cultural differentials on OXTR in the context of romantic-bond formation instead of socialization under stress I think you’d find that the effects of cultural slut-shaming is more detrimental to bond formation in women than is their number of actual partners.
