Neuroscience: Trust Me
Originally published in Reader's Digest. See the full text here.
How to Earn the Confidence of Others
Your parents probably warned you not to trust strangers. And yet, when you’re investing money, leaving your car at the auto repair shop or ordering food at a restaurant, you’re relying on people you don’t know. Despite the classic childhood admonition, we all trust strangers. And we want them to trust us, too.
Trust has long posed a problem for academia. How do you observe it in a lab? In 1992, researchers created an experiment called the “investment game,” which revolutionized the field by replicating trust-based interactions. In the game, the first participant, or the sender, receives a small amount of money. The sender can choose to give some to an anonymous second person, the responder. If they do, the value of the donated currency triples (if the sender gives $10, the responder will receive $30). The responder then can-but is not obligated to-repay the sender or add a return on the investment.
What choices do senders make? It depends how trusting they are. What do responders do next? It depends on their trustworthiness. Studies confirm that, although we trust strangers, we don’t trust them equally. There are steps you can take, however, to convince others to put their faith in you.
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