ABSTRACT
How “social hormones” impact psychological processes has emerged as a topic of considerable interest to scholars and laypeople alike, but the existing literature yields few definitive conclusions. Evolutionary theorizing may help clarify the fundamental mechanisms behind hormone-behavior interactions. Across the animal kingdom, hormonal systems act as biological coordinators that dynamically allocate an organism’s limited resources in response to life circumstances. We show how this framing can benefit the study of social hormones by reviewing the natural history of the neuropeptide oxytocin, and proposing a functional conceptualization based on its evolved psychological and physiological roles.
