Poster No:
813
Submission Type:
Abstract Submission
Authors:
Huan Wang1, Christy Wang1, Brian Knutson1, Jeanne Tsai1
Institutions:
1Stanford University, Palto Alto, CA
First Author:
Co-Author(s):
Introduction:
Trust based on prior interaction has been associated with increased activity in mesolimbic regions including the Medial PreFrontal Cortex (MPFC) and Nucleus Accumbens (NAcc; Rilling et al., 2002; Bellucci et al., 2017), and linked to pursuit of cooperation and gains (Samanez-Larkin & Knutson, 2015). Distrust of strangers, however, has been associated with increased Anterior Insula (AIns) activity, and linked to avoidance of social betrayal (Aimone et al., 2014) and losses (Samanez-Larkin & Knutson, 2015). Therefore, prior information about interaction partners offers reputational information that can facilitate cooperation and trust, even in different cultures (Delgado et al., 2005; Bente et al., 2014). Behavioral research suggests, however, that different cultures may have different default expectations of trustworthiness. Specifically, European Americans may trust strangers more than East Asians (Buchan et al., 2002; Kiyonari et al., 2006). We aimed to investigate whether individuals from these cultures would show different trust defaults as well as neural predictors of choices to trust strangers.
Methods:
We assessed brain activity using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) in 25 healthy European American and 27 Chinese adults as they played 72 trials of a single-shot Trust Game (Glaeser et al. 2000). On each trial, subjects saw a picture of a partner's face (4s), followed by information about the previous reciprocation history of that partner (i.e., the percentage of previous players who rated the partner as trustworthy; 4s), and finally a spatially counterbalanced prompt to indicate how much they chose to invest in the partner (between $0 to $6 endowment in an increment of $2; 4s), which served as a proxy for trust. To ensure incentive compatibility, subjects were notified that one randomly-chosen trial would be chosen to count as binding after scanning.
Results:
As predicted, European Americans chose to invest more often than Chinese (F = 20.10, p < .001), consistent with a higher default expectation of trust among European Americans. Neural activity was extracted from three Volumes Of Interest (VOIs; i.e., NAcc, AIns, and MPFC) immediately before subjects chose whether to invest in partners. Multivariate mixed-effect logistic regressions used this brain data to predict choices on each trial. Analyses revealed a culture by AIns interaction (t = -2.30, p = .022), in which AIns activity negatively predicted choices to invest for European Americans (B = -.56, p = .007). Analyses also revealed culture by NAcc (t = -2.93, p = .003) and culture by MPFC (t = -2.18, p = .029) interactions, in which activity in these regions positively predicted choices to invest for Chinese (MPFC: B = .32, p < .001; NAcc: B = .36, p = .047). VOI analyses using the same brain data further demonstrated that low reputation partners increased AIns activity more for European Americans than for Chinese (F = 3.51, p = .03; t = 2.69, p = .01), whereas high reputation partners increased NAcc activity more for Chinese than for European Americans (F = 4.95, p = .001; t = 2.73, p = .009).
Conclusions:
Together, these findings suggest that cultural values can shape the default level of trust, which may then interact with a partner's reputation to determine cultural predictors of trust. On the one hand, European Americans with high trust default expectations distrusted disreputable partners, which was predicted by higher AIns activity. On the other hand, Chinese with low trust default expectations trusted reputable partners, which was predicted by increased NAcc and MPFC activity. Together, these findings suggest that culture may modulate motivations to trust – a lesson with potential implications for improving cross-cultural communication and cooperation.
Emotion, Motivation and Social Neuroscience:
Social Interaction 1
Emotion and Motivation Other 2
Higher Cognitive Functions:
Decision Making
Modeling and Analysis Methods:
Activation (eg. BOLD task-fMRI)
Multivariate Approaches
Keywords:
Emotions
FUNCTIONAL MRI
Social Interactions
Other - Culture
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
Provide references using author date format
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