Oxytocin and Envy: How the “Love Hormone” Fuels Schadenfreude and Social Rivalry
Last updated: April 2026
For years, oxytocin was the neuroscience darling – the “love hormone” that promoted trust, bonding, and warmth between humans. Then a 2009 experiment at the University of Haifa turned that narrative sideways. Researchers found that a single dose of intranasal oxytocin didn’t just make people more trusting or generous – it made them more envious when they lost, and more gleeful when others failed. The finding was among the first rigorous demonstrations that oxytocin envy and oxytocin schadenfreude were real, measurable phenomena, and it forced a fundamental rethink of what this ancient neuropeptide actually does.
This article examines the landmark research on oxytocin envy and oxytocin schadenfreude, the social salience hypothesis that emerged to explain these findings, and the broader evidence that oxytocin is not a purely prosocial molecule but a context-dependent social modulator with a genuine dark side of oxytocin that includes oxytocin negative effects on social behaviour.
The Landmark Study: Oxytocin Increases Envy and Schadenfreude
In 2009, neuroscientist Simone Shamay-Tsoory and colleagues at the University of Haifa published a double-blind, placebo-controlled study in Biological Psychiatry that challenged the prevailing view of oxytocin as a universally prosocial hormone. The study – titled “Intranasal Administration of Oxytocin Increases Envy and Schadenfreude (Gloating)” – remains one of the most cited papers on oxytocin negative effects in social behaviour (Shamay-Tsoory et al., 2009).
Fifty-six participants received either intranasal oxytocin or a placebo in a within-subject crossover design, then played a game of chance with another participant (who was actually fictitious). The game was rigged to create three conditions: one where the participant gained less money than the other player (envy manipulation), one where the participant gained more money (schadenfreude manipulation), and one where both gained equal amounts (control).
The results were striking. Compared to placebo, oxytocin significantly increased self-reported envy during the relative-loss condition – participants felt worse about their own outcomes when they knew someone else had done better. Oxytocin also significantly increased gloating (schadenfreude) during the relative-gain condition – participants felt better about their own outcomes specifically because the other person had done worse. Crucially, oxytocin had no effect on emotional ratings during equal-outcome trials, and it did not alter general mood. The effect was specific to social comparison.
This was a direct challenge to the narrative built by the trust and bonding literature. Oxytocin wasn’t simply amplifying warmth or affiliation. It was amplifying the emotional intensity of social comparisons – including emotions most people would consider ugly.
The Social Salience Hypothesis: A New Framework
The envy and schadenfreude findings posed a puzzle: how could the same molecule that promotes trust and maternal bonding also intensify envy and gloating? The answer came in the form of the social salience hypothesis, formally articulated by Shamay-Tsoory and Abu-Akel in a 2016 review published in Biological Psychiatry (Shamay-Tsoory & Abu-Akel, 2016).
The hypothesis proposes that oxytocin social salience is the unifying mechanism. Rather than promoting any single emotion, oxytocin increases the salience – the perceived importance and attentional priority – of social cues in the environment. In a cooperative context, this means heightened trust and generosity. In a competitive context, it means heightened envy, schadenfreude, or aggression. Oxytocin doesn’t decide which social emotion to amplify; the context does.
Shamay-Tsoory and Abu-Akel proposed that oxytocin achieves this through its interaction with the dopaminergic system, particularly the mesolimbic pathway. Dopamine is the brain’s primary “salience signal” – the chemical that marks stimuli as important and worth attending to. By modulating dopamine activity, oxytocin may function as a gain-control knob for social information, turning up the signal on whatever social cues are most relevant in a given moment.
The social salience framework accounts for findings that previously seemed contradictory. It explains why oxytocin increases trust in cooperative scenarios (Kosfeld et al., 2005, Nature), amplifies envy in competitive ones (Shamay-Tsoory et al., 2009), promotes in-group favouritism in intergroup contexts (De Dreu et al., 2010, 2011), and enhances both positive and negative emotional responses to social stimuli. In every case, oxytocin is doing the same underlying thing – making social cues more salient – with the behavioural outcome depending entirely on the situation.
Oxytocin and Ethnocentrism: In-Group Love, Out-Group Bias
The darker implications of oxytocin social salience became clearer with a series of studies by Carsten De Dreu and colleagues at the University of Amsterdam. In 2010, De Dreu’s team published in Science a study showing that oxytocin drives a “tend and defend” response: it promoted in-group trust and cooperation while simultaneously increasing defensive aggression toward competing out-groups (De Dreu et al., 2010).
A follow-up study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) went further. De Dreu et al. (2011) demonstrated that oxytocin ethnocentrism was a robust and multifaceted phenomenon. Using the Implicit Association Test (IAT), the researchers showed that Dutch participants given oxytocin exhibited stronger implicit bias – faster in-group associations and slower out-group associations – compared to those given placebo. In a particularly revealing paradigm, oxytocin reduced participants’ willingness to sacrifice an in-group member to save a larger collective, but had no such protective effect for out-group members.
The authors were blunt in their conclusions: these findings “call into question the view of oxytocin as an indiscriminate ‘love drug’ or ‘cuddle chemical’ and suggest that oxytocin has a role in the emergence of intergroup conflict and violence.” Miller (2010), writing in Science, aptly described this as “the prickly side of oxytocin.”
The ethnocentrism research intersects directly with the envy and schadenfreude findings. Both demonstrate that oxytocin intensifies social emotions that involve comparison – comparing one’s own payoffs with another’s, or comparing one’s own group with another. In every case, the pattern is the same: oxytocin makes the social dimension more salient, amplifying whatever emotion the social context calls for.
Challenging the “Love Hormone” Narrative
The accumulating evidence for the dark side of oxytocin has fundamentally changed how researchers frame this molecule. The early narrative – popularised through landmark trust experiments and widely repeated in popular science – presented oxytocin as nature’s cooperation molecule, the biological foundation of empathy and moral behaviour. That narrative was always too simple.
Several additional lines of evidence have contributed to the revision. Grillon et al. (2013) showed in a study published in Molecular Psychiatry that oxytocin enhanced the startle response to unpredictable threats – effectively increasing anxiety rather than reducing it. This finding is consistent with the social salience hypothesis: in an environment of uncertain threat, heightened vigilance is the contextually appropriate response, and oxytocin amplifies it.
Ne’eman and colleagues (2016) demonstrated in Psychoneuroendocrinology that oxytocin increased emotional distress to socially painful stimuli – participants who received oxytocin before watching scenes of social exclusion reported greater emotional discomfort. Meanwhile, Shamay-Tsoory et al. (2013) found that oxytocin enhanced empathic accuracy – the ability to read others’ emotions – but this included enhanced detection of negative emotions, not just positive ones. Gonzalez-Liencres, Shamay-Tsoory, and Brüne (2013) explored this further in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, noting that oxytocin modulates empathy through both phylogenetic mechanisms and context-dependent social factors, and can amplify empathic responses to distress.
Taken together, these findings reveal a more nuanced but ultimately more interesting picture. Oxytocin is not a “love hormone” or a “trust molecule” – it is a social modulator. It increases the brain’s sensitivity to social information, making social cues more attention-grabbing, more emotionally intense, and more likely to drive behaviour. Whether that behaviour is prosocial or antisocial depends on the social context, the individual’s personality, their relationship to the people involved, and the nature of the social cues present.
Broader Implications for Understanding Oxytocin
The shift from “love hormone” to “social salience modulator” has important consequences – both for basic neuroscience and for the clinical applications of oxytocin that have been widely discussed.
Reframing Therapeutic Applications
Oxytocin has been investigated as a potential treatment for autism spectrum conditions, social anxiety disorder, and schizophrenia – conditions characterised by atypical social behaviour. The social salience framework suggests that administering oxytocin in therapeutic settings would amplify whatever social dynamics are present. In a supportive, structured clinical environment, this might enhance engagement and social learning. In an uncontrolled or threatening social environment, it might amplify anxiety, social pain, or intergroup hostility. Yatawara et al. (2016) conducted a meta-analysis in Molecular Autism of oxytocin trials in autism and found mixed results, with effect sizes varying substantially across studies and contexts – a pattern entirely consistent with the salience model.
Individual Differences Matter
The social salience hypothesis also emphasises that oxytocin’s effects depend on individual characteristics. Gender, baseline personality traits, attachment style, and the degree of existing psychopathology all modulate how oxytocin influences behaviour. Shamay-Tsoory and Abu-Akel (2016) noted that the same dose of oxytocin can produce opposing behavioural effects in different people depending on these baseline variables. This makes the idea of oxytocin as a simple prosocial intervention – spray it and people become kinder – deeply misleading.
Evolutionary Perspective
From an evolutionary standpoint, a purely prosocial molecule would be a vulnerability. An organism that trusted indiscriminately and never experienced envy, social competition, or in-group protectiveness would be easily exploited. The emerging picture of oxytocin makes more evolutionary sense: it is a hormone that makes social information matter more, enabling the organism to respond appropriately to both cooperative and competitive social environments. Envy motivates pursuit of resources. Schadenfreude reinforces social hierarchies. In-group favouritism protects the tribe. These are not bugs in the oxytocin system – they are features, shaped by millions of years of social selection.
Summary: Oxytocin as a Social Amplifier
The journey from “love hormone” to social salience modulator is one of the most important revisions in modern behavioural neuroscience. Shamay-Tsoory’s 2009 envy and schadenfreude findings, De Dreu’s ethnocentrism research, and the formal social salience hypothesis have collectively transformed our understanding of what oxytocin does and does not do.
Oxytocin does not make people nicer. It does not make them more trusting in all contexts. It does not suppress negative social emotions. Instead, it amplifies whatever social emotion the situation demands – trust in cooperative environments, envy in competitive ones, empathy toward close others, and hostility toward perceived outsiders. Understanding this is essential for anyone interested in the real science of oxytocin, whether as a researcher, clinician, or informed reader.
For a broader view of oxytocin research, see our pages on oxytocin and trust, the science of love, and the full reference library.
References
- Shamay-Tsoory SG, Fischer M, Dvash J, Harari H, Perach-Bloom N, Levkovitz Y. Intranasal administration of oxytocin increases envy and schadenfreude (gloating). Biological Psychiatry. 2009;66(9):864–870. doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2009.06.009
- Shamay-Tsoory SG, Abu-Akel A. The social salience hypothesis of oxytocin. Biological Psychiatry. 2016;79(3):194–202. doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2015.07.020
- De Dreu CKW, Greer LL, Handgraaf MJJ, Shalvi S, Van Kleef GA. The neuropeptide oxytocin regulates parochial altruism in intergroup conflict among humans. Science. 2010;328(5984):1408–1411. doi:10.1126/science.1189047
- De Dreu CKW, Greer LL, Van Kleef GA, Shalvi S, Handgraaf MJJ. Oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2011;108(4):1262–1266. doi:10.1073/pnas.1015316108
- Kosfeld M, Heinrichs M, Zak PJ, Fischbacher U, Fehr E. Oxytocin increases trust in humans. Nature. 2005;435(7042):673–676. doi:10.1038/nature03701
- Grillon C, Krimsky M, Charney DR, Vytal K, Ernst M, Cornwell B. Oxytocin increases anxiety to unpredictable threat. Molecular Psychiatry. 2013;18(9):958–960. doi:10.1038/mp.2012.156
- Gonzalez-Liencres C, Shamay-Tsoory SG, Brüne M. Towards a neuroscience of empathy: ontogeny, phylogeny, brain mechanisms, context and psychopathology. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. 2013;37(8):1537–1548. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2013.05.001
- Yatawara CJ, Einfeld SL, Hickie IB, Davenport TA, Guastella AJ. The effect of oxytocin nasal spray on social interaction deficits observed in young children with autism: a randomized clinical crossover trial. Molecular Psychiatry. 2016;21(9):1225–1231. doi:10.1038/mp.2015.162
- Miller G. The prickly side of oxytocin. Science. 2010;328(5984):1343. doi:10.1126/science.328.5984.1343-a
- Kemp AH, Guastella AJ. Oxytocin: prosocial behavior, social salience, or approach-related behavior? Biological Psychiatry. 2010;67(6):e33–e34. doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2009.11.019
Frequently Asked Questions
Does oxytocin cause envy?
Research by Shamay-Tsoory et al. (2009), published in Biological Psychiatry, found that intranasal oxytocin significantly increased self-reported envy during a game-of-chance paradigm in which participants received less money than another player. Oxytocin does not create envy from nothing, but it amplifies the intensity of envy when social comparison cues are present. The effect is specific to unequal social outcomes – oxytocin had no effect on emotional ratings when participants and their counterparts received equal amounts.
What is schadenfreude, and how is it linked to oxytocin?
Schadenfreude is a German-derived term meaning pleasure taken from another person’s misfortune. The same 2009 study by Shamay-Tsoory and colleagues showed that oxytocin increased schadenfreude (also called gloating) when participants gained more money than another player. This indicates oxytocin amplifies the full spectrum of social comparison emotions – not just warmth or empathy, but also competitive satisfaction at another’s disadvantage.
What is the social salience hypothesis of oxytocin?
The social salience hypothesis, proposed by Shamay-Tsoory and Abu-Akel in a 2016 review in Biological Psychiatry, argues that oxytocin’s primary function is to increase the salience (perceived importance and attentional priority) of social cues. Rather than promoting any single emotion like trust or love, oxytocin amplifies whatever social emotion is contextually appropriate – trust in cooperative settings, envy in competitive ones, or in-group bias in intergroup scenarios. The hypothesis proposes that oxytocin achieves this through its interaction with the brain’s dopaminergic salience system.
Does oxytocin promote racism or prejudice?
Research by De Dreu et al. (2011) found that oxytocin promoted ethnocentrism – increasing implicit favouritism toward one’s own ethnic group while increasing derogation of out-group members. However, describing this as “promoting racism” oversimplifies the finding. Oxytocin appears to strengthen the salience of in-group/out-group boundaries that already exist, amplifying pre-existing biases rather than creating prejudice from scratch. The effect is better understood as part of oxytocin’s general role in making social group dynamics more emotionally intense.
Is oxytocin still considered a “love hormone”?
The “love hormone” label remains widely used in popular media, but most researchers now consider it misleading. While oxytocin does play important roles in maternal bonding, pair bonding, and trust, research has shown it also amplifies envy, schadenfreude, ethnocentrism, and anxiety in certain contexts. The current scientific consensus is that oxytocin functions as a social modulator – increasing the brain’s sensitivity to social cues of all kinds – rather than a molecule that exclusively promotes positive social emotions.
Could oxytocin therapy have negative side effects?
The social salience hypothesis raises important cautions about therapeutic uses of oxytocin. If oxytocin amplifies whatever social dynamics are present, administering it in an unsupportive, competitive, or threatening social environment could increase anxiety, envy, or intergroup hostility rather than prosocial behaviour. Clinical trials of oxytocin for conditions like autism have produced mixed results, with effect sizes varying across studies and contexts – a pattern consistent with the context-dependent nature of the hormone. Any therapeutic application would need to carefully manage the social environment during and after administration.