Abstract
While much is known about citizens’ decisions to trust others, much less is known about
the cognitive mechanisms that underlie these decisions. Thus, we analyze both the behavior and
brain activity associated with trust by replicating well known experiments on trust with
electroencephalograph (EEG) and timed-response technology. Although our behavioral results
are consistent with previous research, our EEG results reveal something about trust that we do
not learn from simply observing subjects’ decisions and reaction times. Specifically, they
demonstrate that subjects process information differently when it comes from someone who is
trustworthy by virtue of sharing common interests with them versus someone who is made
trustworthy by an external institution. This processing difference exists even though subjects are
equally likely to base their decisions upon the statements of these two trustworthy individuals
and even though they take the same amount of time to make their decisions. Given these
differences between subjects’ behavior and brain activity, it appears that recording EEGs adds a
new dimension to our understanding of subjects’ decisions to trust the statements of others.
Convention