The Moral Molecule by Paul J. Zak

Author:Paul J. Zak [Zak, Paul J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101585559
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-09T16:00:00+00:00

The Goddess of Greed

In 2011 a film crew came to our lab to do a documentary on the Seven Deadly Sins, and they brought along an unusual young woman named Stephanie Castagnier. If you watched Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, you may remember her as the Canadian-born real estate wizard who presented herself as, essentially, the goddess of greed. She’s very attractive, very feminine, but with the aggressive drive to make her first million in a bare-knuckles business before the age of thirty.

I designed a set of experiments to examine her HOME system. Despite all her aggressiveness in business, it turns out that she has unusually low testosterone. But she has a genetic anomaly in which her body manages to extract incredible amounts of DHT—the high-octane stuff that often prompts punishing behavior—out of the limited testosterone she has to work with. DHT, of course, blocks oxytocin. So Stephanie is, as she freely admits, like a lot of guys in being incredibly driven and not so good at empathy. But there’s more to her story.

When she was a child her father had been a high-rolling drug dealer, so while her family had plenty of money, she lived in a kind of war zone with machine guns under the bed, cash stashed in pillowcases, and strange—sometimes violent—goings-on at all hours. By the time Stephanie was in middle school, her father’s own drug use had knocked him down to street dealer, and ultimately to homeless junkie. During this period he would steal her sneakers, her jacket, her textbooks—anything he might be able to sell for a few dollars to spend on drugs. She slept with a baseball bat beside her bed for fear that he might sell her to one of his junkie friends, or that someone would simply break in and rape her. Both her parents died from AIDS before she finished high school.

We had Stephanie watch the video about Ben, the little boy with cancer, and she told us she felt moved and that she was working hard to hold back the tears. But her blood tests showed no oxytocin release, which means no real empathy. Being a highly resilient and savvy survivor, she simply knew how to say all the right things.

When I called Stephanie to share her test results with her, I cautioned that she might not want to know what I’d found; it might be too revealing of her inner self. She said she did want to know. One implication of ODD is an inability to sustain romantic relationships. Stephanie laughed and said she went through men like so many pairs of running shoes.

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