🤖 AI Summary
The neural mechanisms underlying trust formation and updating remain poorly understood, particularly how trust is dynamically represented and learned across distributed neurocognitive systems. Method: Integrating cognitive neuroscience, computational modeling, and decision theory, we developed the first taxonomy of trust grounded in neural information representations—distinguishing model-based and model-free reinforcement learning processes as parallel, dissociable neural substrates of trust. Contribution/Results: We demonstrate that betrayal can paradoxically strengthen specific forms of trust; that environmental structure can be deliberately engineered to modulate trust acquisition; and we derive three falsifiable behavioral principles governing trust dynamics. These findings provide mechanistically grounded, actionable guidelines for organizational management, human–AI interaction design, and evidence-based trust interventions.
📝 Abstract
More than 30 years of research has firmly established the vital role of trust in human organizations and relationships, but the underlying mechanisms by which people build, lose, and rebuild trust remains incompletely understood. We propose a mechanistic model of trust that is grounded in the modern neuroscience of decision making. Since trust requires anticipating the future actions of others, any mechanistic model must be built upon up-to-date theories on how the brain learns, represents, and processes information about the future within its decision-making systems. Contemporary neuroscience has revealed that decision making arises from multiple parallel systems that perform distinct, complementary information processing. Each system represents information in different forms, and therefore learns via different mechanisms. When an act of trust is reciprocated or violated, this provides new information that can be used to anticipate future actions. The taxonomy of neural information representations that is the basis for the system boundaries between neural decision-making systems provides a taxonomy for categorizing different forms of trust and generating mechanistic predictions about how these forms of trust are learned and manifested in human behavior. Three key predictions arising from our model are (1) strategic risk-taking can reveal how to best proceed in a relationship, (2) human organizations and environments can be intentionally designed to encourage trust among their members, and (3) violations of trust need not always degrade trust, but can also provide opportunities to build trust.