Oxytocin taking off

Since I posted my two entries on the oxytocin/ethnocentrism link last week - part 1, part 2 - they have really taken off and gotten more attention than my very modest blog is used to. The first one has been linked on economist Tyler Cowen's blog Marginal Revolution, which generated a surge of over 3000 visitors over the following few days, on BigThink.com - "Hormones Are Not Deterministic" and it's even been translated into Spanish by Eduardo of the blog La revolución naturalista - "Oxitocina, etnocentrismo y determinismo hormonal", with an interesting discussion following in the comments. Both posts were also recently linked by Daniel Lende of the blog Neuroanthropology with the words "It’s always great to discover an exciting new blog!" Right back at you! His post linking me is also currently featured on the front page of PLoS Blogs.

The two entries have also been tweeted a few times, notably by Bora Zivkovic (@BoraZ) of A Blog Around The Clock, @CulturalNeuro and Maria Popova (@brainpicker) of BrainPickings.org.

I've also gotten a bunch of new Twitter followers in the process, and I'm averaging 200 visitors a day on the blog, which is about 10 times more (I told you it was modest) than before the oxytocin posts. I also seem to notice an increase in the amount of comments on other blog posts as well.

Finally I also wanted to mention a few blog posts that also comment on the oxytocin/ethnocentrism findings that I neglected to mention in my original entries. Ed Yong has a post on Not Exactly Rocket Science that veers a little bit towards the "hormonal determinism" side. He also writes that this finding "makes a degree of evolutionary sense", which I would argue against. On The Frontal Cortex Jonah Lehrer thankfully focuses on oxytocin effects and the complexity of the neurobiological substrates. Both posts are less critical of the original findings by De Dreu and co-workers, which balances my two posts nicely.