Daniel O'Connor | Integral Ventures, LLC
Kevin McCabe of Neuroeconomics offers us this post on Trust Building in the Brain, citing a recent article:
Using a multiround version of an economic exchange (trust game), we report that reciprocity expressed by one player strongly predicts future trust expressed by their partner—a behavioral finding mirrored by neural responses in the dorsal striatum. Here, analyses within and between brains revealed two signals—one encoded by response magnitude, and the other by response timing. Response magnitude correlated with the ‘‘intention to trust’’ on the next play of the game, and the peak of these ‘‘intention to trust’’ responses shifted its time of occurrence by 14 seconds as player reputations developed. This temporal transfer resembles a similar shift of reward prediction errors common to reinforcement learning models, but in the context of a social exchange. These data extend previous model-based functional magnetic resonance imaging studies into the social domain and broaden our view of the spectrum of functions implemented by the dorsal striatum.
As Kevin put it:
This suggests that at first people closely monitor each other and use costly brain resources to invoke a "theory-of-mind" model of each others intentions, as seen in the earlier work by McCabe et. al. But over time the brain economizes on scarce resources by coding an anticipatory response to the trust arrangement.
I wonder if this supports the idea that the transaction costs associated with the mutual pursuit of accountability between market participants can decrease over multiple exchanges as each party earns the other's trust. We can hope that our brains have evolved to support this learning and build this social capital.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
See Also:
