Trust me, I'm a Doctor.

A thousand comediennes feasted on that line but the tacit approval and trust given experts was a by line of past society. There were particular people and occupations that engendered trust by their mere position or standing as a so called experts. It wasn't the people close to you like Aunty Jean who you asked about that pain in your side or your friends where you should spend your honeymoon and you never asked your parents anything? Generally people kept to the "expert" concept of who they should consult and trust but things have changed dramatically in the last decade, especially in the virtual world.

There have been countless studies on the fact that people now trust peers and strangers more, and that social sites have become the arena of the new "experts" as pointed out by the Neilsen Global Online Survey in 2009. What a recent Pew Research Centre study has uncovered, is all this trust and confidant dialogue between friends, acquaintances and strangers has a medical reasoning behind it. Seems our brains release what scientists have dubbed the "cuddle hormone" or oxytocin whenever we relate and engage across any social landscape including the virtual one.

According to the research, regular social site users, especially Facebook, are twice as likely to trust people than other Internet users. That warm feeling you get when someone "pokes" you or sends through a "like" is relatable to the release of oxytocin and wraps you in a blanket of trust, even though you may never have met some of those people you are engaging with.

Trust is a strong foundation upon which nations have built economies as shown by countries like Germany, Sweden and the US, with a trustworthiness factor far outreaching countries with less defined economic models. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak a professor at Claremont college in the US points out that many nations didn't flourish economically until they agreed on areas of trust across things such as weights and measures. So this hard wiring to connect across nations and people is behind the success of the social sites which make virtual relationships seem as real as, well as real ones.

"When we believe that someone trusts us, we trust them back, and this alters our behavior: It makes us more generous, for one". Ultimately, oxytocin is, Zak says, "the social glue that adheres families, communities, and societies while simultaneously acting as an economic lubricant that enables us to engage in all sorts of transactions".

The reason that sites like Facebook have doubled and tripled in less than a decade shows the desire for many people to reconnect even if it doesn't involve face to face. So the worry about lack of face to face relationships as the Pew study found, "has little validity to concerns that people who use social networks experience smaller social networks, less closeness, or are exposed to less diversity." so many articles and research papers have now found that people have even more social ties than they did two years ago and that social isolation is not as great a concern as first thought.

So Mr Zuckerberg, thanks to the "cuddle hormone" we trust you more than the Doctor.