The trust game: Measuring social interaction
If trust is a two-way street, then researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have mapped where in the brain that trust is formulated and how the decision to trust shifts with experience. In a report in this week’s issue of the journal Science, researchers describe where and when trust is formed between two anonymous people interacting via functional magnetic resonance imaging in machines more than 1,500 miles apart. They found that as the interaction continued, the trust response occurred earlier and earlier in the subjects’ interchanges — until a decision about trust occurred even before the latest interaction was completed.