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Published April 1, 2005 | public
Journal Article

Getting to Know You: Reputation and Trust in a Two-Person Economic Exchange

Abstract

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.

Additional Information

© 2005 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Received for publication 30 November 2004. Accepted for publication 7 February 2005. This work was supported by the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine (P.R.M.), National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) grant DA11723 (P.R.M.), National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke grant NS045790 (P.R.M.), National Institute of Mental Health grant MH52797 (P.R.M.), NIDA grant DA14883 (G. Berns), The Kane Family Foundation (P.R.M.), The David and Lucile Packard Foundation (S.R.Q.), and The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (S.R.Q.). We thank P. Dayan, J. Li, T. Lohrenz, C. Stetson, and two anonymous referees for comments on this manuscript. We thank the Hyperscan Development Team at Baylor College of Medicine for Network Experiment Management Object (NEMO) software implementation (www.hnl.bcm.tmc.edu/nemo) and G. Berns for early discussions and efforts leading to the development of hyperscanning. We also thank A. Harvey, S. Flaherty, K. Pfeiffer, R. Pruitt, and S. Gleason for technical assistance.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023