Investigating how the human brain navigates trust and uncertainty

A new Royal Society-funded study will use cooperative and competitive games to explore how people balance personal goals, adapt to betrayal and navigate complex social interactions.

In daily life, people constantly navigate complex social interactions by balancing their own objectives against the goals of others. Traditional neuroscience uses Reinforcement Learning models to explain how individuals decide between exploring unknown choices or sticking with familiar ones. However, these models usually examine isolated, non-social situations. In the real world, uncertainty is far more dynamic because decisions depend on other unpredictable people.

The research project, led by Dr Hazem Toutounji and Professor Claudia von Bastian at the University of Sheffield, will investigate how humans make social decisions when faced with uncertainty about other people's intentions.

To do this, the team will create interactive online strategy games. Volunteers will either team up for mutual gain or go head-to-head in direct competition for financial rewards. Crucially, the games feature built-in unpredictability, forcing players to figure out whether a sudden loss was caused by simple bad luck or an opponent double-crossing them.

“By translating Reinforcement Learning models into the social arena, we can test some truly fascinating questions about human behaviour," explains Dr Toutounji. "For instance, we want to discover whether social beings make decisions by actively simulating the minds of others as they form their own strategies. Furthermore, we will explore a counterintuitive idea: could experiencing greater uncertainty actually be beneficial in certain situations, driving us to cooperate more effectively to navigate the unpredictability of the complex world we live in?”

The multi-stage online study will also collect data on cognitive abilities (such as cognitive flexibility and impulsivity) and personality traits (such as social anxiety) to understand why individuals vary in their social decision-making strategies.

“Interactive games offer a unique opportunity to study how people make decisions in complex, fast-changing situations that are difficult to recreate in traditional laboratory tasks. This project extends that approach to the social world, exploring how our cognitive abilities and personality influence the way we navigate uncertainty and interact with others.” Professor Claudia von Bastian

Cooperation is the bedrock of human society, but it is notoriously fragile. Understanding the exact calculations the brain uses to navigate social risk will provide vital baseline data that can be applied to public policy, healthcare, and psychiatry.