Medical Research Measuring Trust With A Brain
Scan Matthew Herper, 03.31.05, 3:07 PM ET
NEW YORK - Researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine
have developed new brain scanning software that allows them to uncover how
people in business relationships develop bonds of trust--or the kind of
profound distrust that can scuttle a deal.
"There's no risk-free way to trust somebody," says P.
Read Montague, director of Baylor's Human Neuroimaging Laboratory. In
business deals, the problem of trust is especially weighty. How do to
executives negotiating a big merger decide that they know each other well
enough to get the deal done? And how does any individual learn to trust
his or her financial advisor? Montague and his team performed an
experiment that modeling such interactions and using a magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI) machine to see what was happening in the brains of their
subjects. Says Montague: "We found signals that predict what you're going
to do next."
The experiments,
published in tomorrow's issue of Science, revolved around what is
known as a trust game, a simplified model of an economic exchange. One
person, called the investor, is given $20, and told they can invest any
portion of the money with a second player, the trustee. The money invested
automatically triples, and the trustee decides how much money to pay back
to the investor. Montague's team had its subjects repeat the exchange 10
times, allowing the investor to get a feeling of whether or not he was
getting a fair deal. Because a lab at California Institute of Technology
also participated in the study, the investor and the trustee were 1,500
miles apart.
Previous attempts to
study how such games build a relationship have often lasted only a round
or two. Alternatively, only one of the players has been in an MRI machine.
"That's like having a cocktail party with one person," says Brooks
King-Casas, a researcher on Montague's team. This time, both of the
players were in the MRI for the whole time, so researchers could actually
watch a financial relationship evolve--and they found signals in the brain
that predict whether or not people will trust each other.
Moreover, they found that increases
in trust seemed to be far more powerful than decreases: Once an investor
had learned to trust his trustee it was difficult to break the bond. The
bottom line, says King-Casas, is that the research team was able to turn a
fairly fuzzy concept like trust into something measurable.
The impact of work in this vein
could be huge. Obviously, Merrill Lynch (nyse: MER
- news
- people
) and Morgan Stanley (nyse: MWD
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- people
) can use all the information they can get about how financial
relationships are built. Furthermore, deficiencies developing trusting
relationships play an important role in several mental illnesses,
including autism, personality disorders and schizophrenia. For instance,
in personality disorders, patients become trusting far too quickly and
lose trust equally quickly at the smallest slight.
New information about these disorders could lead to new
drugs for pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer (nyse: PFE
- news
- people
) or Bristol-Myers Squibb (nyse: BMY
- news
- people
).
Montague sees the potential
in his software, but he has decided to make it available as an open-source
program, à la Linux, to ensure that academic researchers can use the
program. He says that if any company wanted to develop their own version,
as Red Hat (nasdaq: RHAT
- news
- people
) did with Linux, that would be fine by him.
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