Trust is very important when it comes to love, money or any other area of our daily lives, trusting is taking risks. A recent study explains what motivates people to trust others.
The study, conducted by a team of researchers at Dartmouth College in Hanover, USA. U. S. ), It was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
- Collaboration is essential to human life.
- Promoting interpersonal relationships is intrinsically rewarding.
- It is also essential to meet the fundamental social need to belong to a particular group and promote physical and mental health.
A key aspect of collaboration is trust, which involves taking a mutual risk to another person.
The decision to engage in collaborative interactions requires considerable ongoing risks, but provides the basis for building and maintaining relationships.
Dartmouth College researchers wanted to know the mechanisms behind this process, testing a social value it model to make predictions about collaborative decision-making.
This study involved 26 people who participated in a trusted building game.
Participants believed that they were playing a game based on economic investment, sometimes with a close friend, sometimes with a stranger and sometimes with a slot machine, but in reality they always played with a simple algorithm that offered mutual trust in 50% of cases.
Researchers developed a computational model that predicted each player’s decision at each turn based on their previous experiences in the game.
The results showed that participants found positive interactions more rewarding with a close friend than with interaction with a machine or even with a stranger.
The researchers also noted that the social value model facilitated the prediction of investment decisions than models that only took into account financial results.
This behavior was predicted by the calculation model, which indicated that people were more satisfied with conditional collaboration decisions, based on the proximity of the relationship.
This sign of social value was associated with increased activity in the ventral striatum and median prefrontal cortex, which were able to significantly predict the reward parameters of the social value calculation model.
Neuroimaging showed that the specific brain signals observed in the ventral striatum and median prefrontal cortex were related to signs of social values when participants made their decisions.
The ventral striatum is an essential pathway in the treatment of reward, while the median prefrontal cortex is associated with the representation of the person’s mental state.
Together, these regions provide additional proof that players receive a sign of greater social reward when they realize they are playing with their friend.
This is true even if participants know that each player makes an alternate move 50% of the time, however, when players receive this additional reward signal, they end up trusting their friend more than other players.
“These results show the importance of social relationships in how we make decisions every day and, more specifically, how relationships can change our perceived value associated with a particular resolution,” study co-author Luke Changel said.
Therefore, according to researchers, it has been shown that calculating social value induces cooperative behavior in repeated interactions.