1. Trusting outgroup, but not ingroup members, requires control: neural and behavioral evidence
- Author
-
Hughes, Brent L, Ambady, Nalini, and Zaki, Jamil
- Subjects
Social and Personality Psychology ,Psychology ,Adolescent ,Brain ,Competitive Behavior ,Cooperative Behavior ,Decision Making ,Electroencephalography ,Female ,Gyrus Cinguli ,Humans ,Individuality ,Internal-External Control ,Interpersonal Relations ,Magnetic Resonance Imaging ,Male ,Parietal Lobe ,Prefrontal Cortex ,Reaction Time ,Reward ,Social Identification ,Temporal Lobe ,Trust ,Young Adult ,intergroup dynamics ,prosociality ,reward ,top-down control ,neuroeconomics ,Neurosciences ,Cognitive Sciences ,Experimental Psychology ,Biological psychology ,Clinical and health psychology - Abstract
Trust and cooperation often break down across group boundaries, contributing to pernicious consequences, from polarized political structures to intractable conflict. As such, addressing such conflicts require first understanding why trust is reduced in intergroup settings. Here, we clarify the structure of intergroup trust using neuroscientific and behavioral methods. We found that trusting ingroup members produced activity in brain areas associated with reward, whereas trusting outgroup members produced activity in areas associated with top-down control. Behaviorally, time pressure-which reduces people's ability to exert control-reduced individuals' trust in outgroup, but not ingroup members. These data suggest that the exertion of control can help recover trust in intergroup settings, offering potential avenues for reducing intergroup failures in trust and the consequences of these failures.
- Published
- 2017