WHY WE TRUST OR DON'T TRUST

Posted on April 16, 2018 by Sydney Ceruto, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

Our trust in strangers is dependent on their resemblance to others we’ve previously known.
Through my studies, I have found that people are distrusted even when they only minimally resemble someone previously associated with immoral behavior.
Like Pavlov’s dog, who, despite being conditioned on a single bell, continues to salivate to bells that have similar tones, we use information about a person’s moral character, in this case whether they can be trusted, as a basic Pavlovian learning mechanism in order to make judgments about strangers.
We make decisions about a stranger’s reputation without any direct or explicit information about them based on their similarity to others we’ve encountered, even when we’re unaware of this resemblance. This shows our brains deploy a learning mechanism in which moral information encoded from past experiences guides future choices.
This shows our brains deploy a learning
mechanism in which moral information encoded from past experiences guides future choices.
Scientists have a better grasp on how social decision-making unfolds in repeated one-on-one interactions. Less clear, however, is how our brain functions in making these same decisions when interacting with strangers.
To explore this, I have conducted a series of experiments centering on a trust game in which participants make a series of decisions about their partners’ trustworthiness—in this case, deciding whether to entrust their money with three different players who were represented by facial images.
Here, the subjects knew that any money they invested would be multiplied four times and that the other player could then either share the money back with the subject (reciprocate) or keep the money for himself (defect).
Each player was highly trustworthy (reciprocated 93 percent of the time), somewhat trustworthy (reciprocated 60 percent of the time), or not at all trustworthy (reciprocated 7 percent of the time).
In a second task, the same subjects were asked to select new partners for another game. However, unbeknownst to the subjects, the face of each potential new partner was morphed, to varying degrees, with one of the three original players so the new partners bore some physical resemblance to the previous ones.
Even though the subjects were not consciously aware that the strangers (i.e., the new partners) resembled those they previously encountered, subjects consistently preferred to play with strangers who resembled the original player they previously learned was trustworthy and avoided playing with strangers resembling the earlier untrustworthy player.
Moreover, these decisions to trust or distrust strangers uncovered an interesting and sophisticated gradient: trust steadily increased the more the stranger looked like the trustworthy partner from the previous experiment and steadily decreased the more the stranger looked like the untrustworthy one.
This finding points to the highly adaptive nature of the brain as it shows we make moral assessments of strangers drawn from previous learning experiences.