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five o’clock shadow. In contrast, the senator from Massachusetts had spent the previous weeks campaigning in California. He was tan, fit, and impeccably tailored. Polled after the debate, radio listeners proclaimed Nixon to be the clear winner. Television viewers, however, came to a different conclusion. Kennedy’s charisma and poised delivery presented television viewers with the marked impression that his vigor and charm discomforted the then vice president, and it swung their allegiance to Kennedy. Viewers were more persuaded by what they saw than by what they heard, according to polling organizations’ results analyzed at the time by Earl Mazzo, head of the Washington bureau of the New York Herald-Tribune.6 According to Mazzo’s analysis, in the West, which Nixon carried, 9 percent of adults heard the debate on radio; in the East, which Nixon lost, the radio audience was about 2 percent.

In order to help strangers—or vote for them—you have to overcome the biological fear response that they will harm you when you approach. In other words, you have to decide to trust them. We know that babies bond intensely with their mothers shortly after birth, but how can they know to trust a stranger enough to help them? Isn’t that another series of complex cognitions? Researchers set out to find out. Peter Kirsch, Christine Esslinger, and others at the Cognitive Neuroscience Group, Center for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Justus-Liebig University showed adult subjects a series of photos of various Caucasian men, each displaying basic, neutral facial expressions, while simultaneously scanning their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Scientists asked the test subjects to label the faces as “trustworthy” or “untrustworthy.” The scans showed that a certain portion of the brain, the amygdala, lit up in subjects when they viewed faces they felt to be untrustworthy.7 The amygdala, an almond-shaped set of neurons located deep in the brain’s medial temporal lobe, is part of the limbic system, the section of the brain that forms neurological structures involved in emotion, motivation, and emotional association with memory. The amygdala enables you to experience fear. (When your father-in-law arrives unannounced for dinner, the amygdala signals fear to the brain stem, the center of arousal and motivation, which conveniently remembers that you left some work at the office that you must immediately leave to retrieve.) Later, the researchers asked the same subjects to rate various characteristics of the faces they had seen. The faces deemed untrustworthy in the first portion of the experiment received more negative ratings for these other characteristics than those deemed trustworthy.

One of the first objects that capture the attention of newborns is the human face, and now, it seems, there are evolutionary, survival reasons for it. First impressions, it seems, do count. Humans are biologically hardwired to make snap decisions to trust or distrust others. Like the 70 million people who watched the Nixon-Kennedy debate, we do tend to judge a book by its cover.

LOOKING OUT FOR NUMBER TWO

If trust isn’t something that results from high, rational functioning, what is it?

Trust, it turns out, is a drug called oxytocin. The so-called bonding hormone is a peptide chain of nine amino acids (nanopeptide) secreted by the pituitary gland and most famously released during the orgasms of both sexes and by mothers during birth and nursing. When released, oxytocin fills the synapses between neurons and floods the brain with a feeling of well-being. This brief bliss (the effects of a cerebral oxytocin buzz last just three to five minutes) reduces the connectivity of the amygdala to the upper brain stem; in other words, it overcomes fear. Kirsch and Esslinger demonstrated this effect. They showed two groups of people identical pictures of fearsome faces and fearsome situations and, like similar studies, mapped their brains’ reactions with fMRI scans. One group received oxytocin via nasal spray (you can synthesize it in a lab); the