Towards a Neurometric-based Construct Validity of Trust

Trust is a nebulous construct central to successful cooperative exchanges and interpersonal relationships. In this study, we introduce a new approach to establishing construct validity of trust using neurometrics. We develop a whole-brain multivariate pattern capable of classifying whether new participants will trust a relationship partner in the context of a cooperative interpersonal investment game (n=40) with 90% accuracy and find that it also generalizes to a variant of the same task collected in a different country with 82% accuracy (n=17). Moreover, we establish the convergent and discriminant validity by testing the pattern on eleven separate datasets (n=496) and find that trust is reliably related to beliefs of safety, inversely related to negative affect, but unrelated to reward, cognitive control, social perception, and self-referential processing. Together these results provide support for the notion that the psychological experience of trust contains elements of beliefs of reciprocation and fear of betrayal aversion. Contrary to our predictions, we found no evidence that trust is related to anticipated reward. This work demonstrates how neurometrics can be used to characterize the psychological processes associated with brain-based multivariate representations.

What motivates avoidance in paranoia? Three failures to find a betrayal aversion effect

Believing that others intend to harm you (paranoia) is often accompanied by social withdrawal, avoidance and isolation. We investigated whether paranoia is related to betrayal aversion: the tendency to avoid potential harm caused by other people over and above an equivalent harm caused by a non-social mechanism. Across three large-N (Ntotal=2433) pre-registered online studies, we employed a game theoretic paradigm where participants engaged in interactions with real players. Studies 1 and 2 explored betrayal aversion by eliciting participants’ willingness to enter interactions where monetary reward was either determined by another player or a lottery. Study 3 examined betrayal aversion in a context where choices were not financially-incentivised. Paranoia was not associated with betrayal aversion or risk aversion in any study. We consider two possibilities: that paranoia does not involve increased risk aversion or betrayal aversion, or that the paradigm was limited in terms of its ability to trigger betrayal and risk aversion behaviour in paranoia.