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Trust in the brain

Nature Neuroscience volume 5, pages 192–193 (2002)Cite this article

A new event-related fMRI study suggests that decisions about trustworthiness involve structures that process emotions, and raises intriguing questions about cues used for such judgments.

In this issue, Winston and colleagues4 examined these two questions by using the power of event-related fMRI to study a particular class of social judgments: those of trustworthiness. Subjects were shown pictures of faces and asked to perform two tasks while in the scanner. One task investigated the neural regions that might subserve overt processing by having subjects indicate whether the face looked trustworthy or not. The other task examined automatic, implicit processing of trustworthiness by having subjects perform an unrelated cognitive evaluation (indicate whether the face looked like a high school student or a college student).

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Figure 1: A neurological basis for judging trustworthiness.

AP/Wide World Photos Amy Center

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  1. Ralph Adolphs: The author is in the Dept. of Neurology

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  1. University of Iowa College of Medicine, 200 Hawkins Street, Iowa City, 52242, Iowa, USA

    Ralph Adolphs

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  1. Ralph Adolphs
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Adolphs, R. Trust in the brain. Nat Neurosci 5, 192–193 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn0302-192

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn0302-192

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