Intangibles

Teammates swarmed Huff in the dugout, roaring with laughter and slapping high fives. Huff sank onto the bench, red-faced and heaving, but also laughing. Someone handed him a cup of Gatorade. Young third baseman Pablo Sandoval fanned him with a towel. In the clubhouse after the game, the barbs and howls erupted all over again each time the TV showed replays of Huff’s runaway-beer-truck trip around the bags. The funniest digs came from Huff himself.

“That’s when I felt finally that I was really part of a team,” Huff said later. “I finally felt part of the guys.”

From a physiology standpoint, the warm, exultant reception from teammates almost certainly set in motion the production of oxytocin in Huff’s brain. He experienced the physical sensation of acceptance. Huff’s heart rate slowed. A rush of serotonin and dopamine — piggy-backing on the oxytocin — lifted his mood and his energy.

Over time, he began to feel an ease he hadn’t known since, well, maybe ever. He became more open to the everyday signals of trust and became more trusting, more accepting, and less self-centered in return. His life outside of baseball was a mess — he was still drinking and popping Adderall, and his marriage was still crumbling — but with his teammates he could be the person his teammates seemed to think he was. He began arriving at the park early and leaving late. He rediscovered his power at the plate and led the team in doubles, triples, and home runs. Most surprising, he found teammates gravitating to him for advice or a laugh, as if he were a leader.

“They’d ask me about things,” he said, “and that had never happened to me in my life.”

Paul Zak picked me up at my hotel in Ontario, California, on an August morning in 2016 in a black Mercedes with a vanity plate that read OXYTOSN. He was trim, tanned, and sported a stylish touch of gray at the temples. He dressed like a hip politician: crisp blue dress shirt with the cuffs turned up at the wrist, a leather braided bracelet, pleated slacks. I had seen his TED Talk, so I knew the hug was coming. He hugs everyone he meets. Hugs are known to release oxytocin.

Zak is an economics professor and the founder and director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University. His economics studies had piqued his interest in the nature of trust. The most prosperous countries had the most trusting cultures; only when people trust that banks, governments, and businesses are behaving fairly and honestly can economies flourish. Zak got to wondering what made one person trust another. Was there a biological mechanism of trust?

By chance one day in 2000, on an airport shuttle in Nevada, Zak found himself next to anthropologist Helen Fisher, well-known for her studies on the biology of love. In discussing their respective work, she asked Zak if he had ever studied the connection between trust and oxytocin. At that point, he had never heard of oxytocin, the so-called love hormone.

He learned that oxytocin is produced deep inside the brain in a hormone-regulating region called the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus then dispatches oxytocin to the tiny, almond-shaped amygdala, which has a high concentration of oxytocin receptors. The amygdala is essentially the brain’s emotional scanner, interpreting every sight, sound, smell, taste, or touch for its emotional meaning. The amygdala tells us a friend’s curt tone, for instance, means she’s not happy. In animals, oxytocin fosters nurturing in rodents, monogamy in prairie voles, and social bonding in almost every species tested. When Animal A nuzzled, played with, or otherwise signaled to Animal B he was safe to approach, Animal B’s brain released oxytocin and was friendly in return.

To Zak, that looked a lot like trust. Was oxytocin the biological underpinning he was hunting for? With two colleagues at Claremont, Zak recruited students to participate in a well-known exercise called “the trust game.”*

They sat the students in cubicles and, at random, assigned them partners, who never saw each other or communicated directly. A computer screen in each cubicle told the partners they each had ten dollars in an account. It was theirs to keep just for showing up. But they also had an opportunity to increase the amount.

The first student was asked if she wanted to give some of her ten dollars to her anonymous partner and told that whatever amount she transferred would be tripled. If she gave five dollars, the partner would see his account balance increase by fifteen to twenty-five dollars. The anonymous partner now had the option of sending money back. If he sent ten dollars, for example, they’d both end up with fifteen, boosting their initial take-away by five. Of course, he could pocket the entire twenty-five dollars and call it a day. His partner would never know his identity. There would be no repercussions.

Zak found that 98 percent of the partners did send money back. The question was why.

He took blood samples from each student before and immediately after they made their decisions to send money. He measured the levels of ten different chemicals. Only oxytocin showed a before-and-after change — and only in the recipients, not the initial senders. In other words, receiving money raised the students’ levels of oxytocin. The more money they received, the higher their oxytocin level. Zak and his team were pretty sure at this point that one partner’s gesture of trust triggered the release of oxytocin in the other. But they couldn’t be sure. Maybe the chemical was released simply because of the mini-thrill of receiving money and had nothing to do with trust.

They pulled in more students for more rounds of the trust game. This time, the students didn’t decide for themselves how much to transfer to their anonymous partner. Instead, they picked a Ping-Pong ball from a bucket. On the ball was a number from one through ten, which determined how much the student transferred. The recipients knew the transfer amount had been determined randomly. The results were startling. The oxytocin levels of the recipients were significantly lower than those of students in the earlier rounds, and the amounts they sent back were significantly less generous.

Zak also studied distrust and found that its effect was just as powerful as trust — though only in men. In general, when male students received three dollars or less in a transfer, they were angry and sent back next to nothing. No surprise that their blood showed a spike in a high-octane testosterone called dihydrotestosterone (DHT). The more distrust the men felt, the more distrusting they were with others, with a correlating boost in DHT. On the other hand, when women received a transfer of three dollars or less, Zak found, their testosterone didn’t spike. They felt hurt, disappointed, and sometimes angry, but they almost always sent back a comparable amount no matter how small the initial transfer.

But Zak still couldn’t be certain that oxytocin, and not some other factor, was responsible for increasing the students’ generosity in the trust game. Via a nasal spray, he delivered synthetic oxytocin to half the participants and a placebo to the rest. The oxytocin groups sent back more than twice as much money as the placebo groups.

The conclusion: When people show trust in us, our brains release a surge of oxytocin, which primes us to be trusting and generous in return. Trust begets trust.

The evidence of oxytocin’s impact on bonding and trust, while not yet conclusive, became compelling enough to catch the attention of the US Department of Defense.

The military has long operated on the premise that bonding and trust are essential to performance. This is a big reason for boot camp: hardship fosters bonding. It’s also why soldiers still march during training. Marching into battle is an absurd strategy in modern war, as antiquated as muskets and bayonets. But it is still a staple on military bases around the world because marching in unison, like synchronous chanting and singing in religious rituals, facilitates connection and cooperation.1 Similarly, the ritual of sports teams warming up before practices and games with synchronous stretches strengthens their bonds as it loosens their muscles.

At the core of team chemistry is the profound impact we have on each other, psychologically and physiologically, and research on the military continues to pile up the evidence. Studies have found that emotional connections not only foster selflessness and sacrifice on the battlefield but also help mitigate post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). UCLA did an astounding study on this, using the pension rolls from the Civil War.2 Detailed medical records were kept on more than 90 percent of the thirty-five thousand soldiers in the Union Army’s pension program. This treasure trove of data allowed researchers an unprecedented look at the arc of the soldiers’ lives, from the actual units in which they served through old age and death.

Many units in the Union Army were made up of men from the same town. Because the pension rolls included the hometowns of every soldier, researchers knew which men fought alongside friends and neighbors and which men didn’t. Men in these connected units were less likely later in life to develop physical ailments like cardiovascular disorders, which are sometimes indicative of undiagnosed psychiatric conditions. In other words, being in a more tightly bonded company reduced the likelihood of suffering from what we now call PTSD.

The invention of synthetic oxytocin got the Department of Defense wondering if it could help accelerate the bonding process, thus producing high-performing units faster and protecting soldiers against wartime stress more effectively. In 2016, the Pentagon turned to a UC San Francisco researcher named Josh Woolley.

His lab — the Bonding and Attunement in Neuropsychiatric Disorders Laboratory, or BAND Lab — occupies a squat prefab building on the sprawling campus of the San Francisco VA Medical Center. It sits at the end of a narrow drive below the main parking lot, tucked out of sight like a toolshed on a grand estate. I visited him one rainy afternoon, passing a dusty artificial ficus tree in the entryway, the only nod to hominess in an expanse of filing cabinets and gray cubicles with nameplates like “C14 Thrive Lab” and “C15 BAND Lab (MD/Post-Doc Cubicle).” But I heard young voices and laughter and caught glimpses of researchers in jeans and sneakers under their white lab coats.

Woolley said his office is too much of a mess for me to see, so we sat in a small room usually reserved for behavioral experiments, which is why there were high-definition cameras mounted in three corners and, on a table, a dozen or so “Biopac” systems that measure sweat, heart rate, cardiac impedance, and other automatic physical responses. Woolley has an MD in psychiatry and a PhD in neuroscience. At forty years old, he still looked like a grad student: glasses, short hair, plaid shirt, black jeans, running shoes, and bright, striped socks. He has long been driven to understand the psychological and physiological power of social connection. For him, the research is not an academic exercise. He still sees patients one day a week, mostly military vets, and is awestruck by what they were willing to sacrifice for their comrades.

He choked up telling me about the Vietnam radio operator who, under pounding artillery fire, risked his life remaining at the radio by himself to get help for his embattled unit.

“People were getting killed, and he stayed; he kept doing it, alone, even though he was in danger and people were dying,” Woolley said. “It was very moving. I was telling him it was amazing, and he was like, no. He was actually embarrassed by it. You read these stories about heroism and people that win the Medal of Honor and things like that — they often say it wasn’t heroic what they did. They just didn’t think about it that way. They thought, ‘My friends — what else was I going to do?’”

Woolley’s experiments with synthetic oxytocin, along with the work of several colleagues, landed them a Department of Defense grant for a three-year study on the neuropeptide’s impact on team cohesion among ROTC recruits.* Their goals were to better understand the psychobiological mechanism of cohesion; to develop a way to measure the cohesion of a team; to see if, and how, synthetic oxytocin could enhance it; and to determine any correlation to performance.

Woolley warned that the experiment might accomplish none of those things. He is critical of scientists who jump to sweeping conclusions that make interesting headlines in the New York Times science section but whose results, it often turns out, cannot be replicated. So he couched his own postulations with “We don’t know yet,” “That’s what I’m thinking now,” “This is just a first step.”

Woolley’s research targeted exactly what I was trying to understand about team chemistry — the scientific underpinnings of bonding’s impact on performance. The initial experiments in his double-blind study, which involved three strangers collaborating on a task, were conducted at UC Berkeley with student volunteers and, later, cadets. The work was arduous. From video of the testing sessions, researchers had to code the participants’ gestures and facial expressions — every nod, smile, and furrowed brow; every instance of eye contact and eye aversion. They had to note who took charge, who noticed a fellow participant’s confusion and stepped in to help, who offered the choice of snacks to her fellow volunteers. Every snippet of conversation went through a language-analysis program. Physiological data from body monitors were analyzed to see if heart rates, breathing, or other autonomous responses became synchronous and how the body responded during social interaction and task performance.

With a large enough sample size, Woolley said, the data could show a significant relationship between oxytocin and cohesion, and between cohesion and performance. Or not.

The results would be ready in two years, he said. Or not.

I checked back in two years. The results weren’t ready. As one researcher reminded me more than once, “Joan, science is slow.” It’s not that I expected team chemistry to pop out one day from behind a research paper or a clubhouse door and explain itself to me. But as my research mounted and my interviews multiplied, I started to feel like I was trying to solve a puzzle by picking through a mountain of random pieces.

Pat Burrell had been Huff’s larger-than-life teammate at the University of Miami. He had been the quarterback on his high-school football team and the star slugger on the baseball team. As a junior at Miami, he was named the best college baseball player in the country. That June, he was the first player picked in the MLB draft, by the Philadelphia Phillies. Philly fans expected Burrell to be the next Mike Schmidt, and though he had several outstanding seasons, he fell short of the hype. During the 2008 World Series against the Tampa Bay Rays, Burrell had just one hit, but it was a doozy: a double in Game 5 that would clinch the championship. Afterward, Burrell was a hot commodity, and the Rays laid out more than $16 million to secure his services for 2009 and 2010.

But Burrell, a golden boy all his life, played so abysmally and clashed so sharply with manager Joe Maddon that just twenty-four games into the 2010 season, with $8 million still owed on his contract, the Rays dumped him. “How bad do you have to be performing to be cut by a team that counts every penny more closely than Ebenezer Scrooge?” one Tampa Bay sportswriter wrote.3

Burrell was on the downside of thirty-three. He went home to Arizona and sat by the phone. Weeks passed. No offers.

In the meantime, Huff was lobbying the Giants’ brass to sign his old college buddy. He knows how to win, Huff told anyone who would listen. He’s the slugger we need in the lineup, a student of the game, a hero of the 2008 World Series! He was the Giants’ kind of player, Huff pushed: hard-nosed, old school, big bat. And he was from the Bay Area, a nice local connection. Because the Rays were paying his salary, the Giants could pick him up for almost nothing. They signed him to a minor-league contract in late May and by early June, he was in the Giants lineup.

Burrell arrived in the clubhouse seeming not a bit humbled by his failure in Tampa Bay. Broad-shouldered and square-jawed, he commanded the attention of every room he entered. His good looks and regal bearing brought to mind the prince in Beauty and the Beast, though he was princely in few other ways. Like Huff, he had a vulgar bent that stood out even by baseball standards. But he had a reputation for playing hard and smart, for being a winner.

He blossomed in his new environment, just as Huff had. He rediscovered his passion and energy. He radiated confidence. And the clubhouse, like the superorganism it is, absorbed that passion, energy, and confidence and became something new. Not radically so. More of a shift, the way a dinner party changes when a particularly charismatic guest arrives. Burrell would round up teammates for pregame stretching with an old-fashioned “C’mon, boys!” When the team lost, he let no one hang his head: “We’ll get ’em tomorrow.” He slung an arm around the bench players about to pinch-hit in a tight game. “You got this,” he’d say matter-of-factly, more reminder than exhortation. He pushed the players to look out for each other. After a Giants pitcher struggled through a long inning, wearing himself out throwing way too many pitches, Burrell barked at upcoming Giants hitters, “You have to take pitches! Give our guy time to catch his breath!”

Like Huff’s, Burrell’s performance on the field reflected his ease and sense of purpose in the clubhouse. He led the team in slugging percentage (total bases per at-bat) and was second only to Huff in on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS). His batting average soared from .218 during his tenure in Tampa to .266 in San Francisco. He hit eighteen home runs.

No one was affected by Burrell’s presence more than Huff. “It was almost like a long-lost brother had come home,” he said. Huff felt more capable and confident. He couldn’t let go completely of Huffdaddy — he was still loud and swaggery — but he cared about the men at the other lockers. It mattered what they thought of him. He could never be a leader on his own, but he could with Burrell, almost as if — in line with our open-loop nature — Burrell completed him. “I was not used to being the guy who people are looking to for answers,” Huff said, laughing, when we spoke on the phone. “I was the guy that kind of took it light in the clubhouse, and all of a sudden I felt this responsibility to be the guy that the media would go to after games, and I’m like, ‘Holy shit, I’m not used to this.’”

One day in the clubhouse at the end of August, Burrell found Huff and together they ushered Lincecum into the small office. The superstar pitcher had lost all five of his starts that month. The Giants had slipped six games out of first place. Lincecum didn’t seem to be listening to his coaches or manager Bruce Bochy, and he balked at suggestions that he improve his workout routine. He had been so spectacularly successful his entire life that he seemed paralyzed by failure.

“Timmy, man, I know you’re struggling, bro,” Burrell said, leaning forward in his chair, locking eyes with the young pitcher. “I know this is hard for you. But we need you, Bud, we need you.”

Huff mostly listened. Burrell was pointed but loving. “Look, Timmy, you’re our rock. If we don’t have you, we’re dead. We’re dead.”

“As I’m watching Timmy,” Huff told me later, “his head starts coming up, the chin’s coming up, the chest is coming out a little bit more. You could see in his facial expression, in his eyes, that somebody had belief in him. He’s 0 and 5. He’s getting bad press. Everybody’s on him. And then something was triggered inside of him. You could see it. I’m sitting there in awe watching and listening to this. And no shit, the very next start against Colorado, on September first, he shoved it up Colorado’s ass.”

What I had learned about the brain from Zak, Woolley, and others seemed to be playing out in the relationships and dynamics of these men. Huff and Burrell felt trusted and valued, triggering the release of oxytocin and dopamine and creating a newfound sense of commitment and connection to their teammates. They, in turn, showed trust in Lincecum, revving his own brain chemicals to shift how he believed in himself. This contagion of beliefs and emotions, the very core of team chemistry, changed the course of the Giants’ season. Lincecum went eight innings that day against the Colorado Rockies, striking out nine in the 2–1 victory. He went on to win five of his six starts in September. With seven days left in the regular season, the Giants climbed into first place and held on to win the division.

Something kept nagging at me. Where was testosterone in this sea of feel-good brain chemicals? Here we had a team of twenty-five highly competitive young athletes coursing with testosterone. You could see it in their nose-to-nose arguments with umpires and explosions at opponents whose home-run trots were too slow (Disrespectful!) or bat flips too theatrical (Showing up our pitcher!). Testosterone is one reason home fields give teams an advantage. Researchers have found that athletes’ testosterone levels are higher before home games than before road games, perhaps a vestige of ancestral tribes protecting their territory against outsiders. You would think that inside the clubhouse big, bad testosterone would counteract kind, generous oxytocin. But that wasn’t happening with the 2010 Giants. Oxytocin was winning. Nobody, including macho-men Huff and Burrell, was overtly jockeying for power. Nobody was commandeering the clubhouse sound system to foist his playlist on everyone else. Nobody was calling team meetings to mark his territory as leader. Why weren’t these calling cards of testosterone showing up in the players’ behavior?

Because testosterone has an engaging, social side.

Lab experiments found that in a group of strangers, high-testosterone people were the most highly regarded by the other members.4 They didn’t gain such status by overpowering the group, as you might expect from this somewhat misunderstood, macho hormone. Quite the opposite. They did it by fitting in, listening, helping out.

The researchers found that high testosterone fuels a drive for stature. This drive makes us adjust our mindset and behavior to whatever the group values most, thus allowing us to win over its members. In this way, testosterone is an arrowleaf. On the climb up the social ladder, the environment influences how testosterone expresses itself.

But the research also showed stark anomalies. Some high-testosterone athletes weren’t leaders at all. In fact, some were among the lowest-status players. What was going on? Scientists found that another hormone, cortisol, was altering testosterone’s impact.5 Though cortisol is commonly known as the stress hormone, its actual purpose is to counteract stress. The more stress you feel, the more cortisol your body produces to get you back to equilibrium. Thus, high levels of cortisol indicate high stress.

“Here’s what I think is happening based on research and intuitive leaps and my experience as an athlete in team sports,” said Kathleen Casto, a biopsychologist who has conducted substantial research on testosterone’s and cortisol’s connection to leadership, most recently with the 2016 women’s Olympic field hockey team.6 “If you have high testosterone, then you’re motivated for status among teammates. If you have high cortisol, maybe you’re an anxious person, stressed out. You don’t realize your [negative] impact on teammates. That results in low status. In other words, you want status, but you’re not good at achieving it.”

This suggests a physiological explanation for Huff’s transformation. He finally found himself on a team where he was accepted and valued. This would surely relieve the stress of proving himself, of defending himself against naysayers, including the one in his own head. Perhaps his cortisol level dropped during the 2010 season with the Giants, his behavior changed, and his teammates were drawn to him as a leader.