The Trust Game in neuroscience: a short review

The Trust Game has been increasingly used in the emerging field of neuroeconomics to study brain mechanisms underlying decision-making in social interactions with financial outcomes. In this review, we attempt to concisely describe main neuroscience findings in the context of this game, with a special emphasis on the parameters potentially influencing the results. Factors modulating trust when the subject plays the part of the Investor are clustered into a few major categories: the Trustee, the administration of the game (single-shot or repeated interactions), the impact of hormones and genetics, inter-individual differences, time and other experimental settings. The few studies focusing on the Trustee are then briefly summarized, drawing again the attention of the future experimenter on possible pitfalls as well as offering some interpretation keys to the reader facing divergent results.