Trust behavior in Parkinson's disease:results of a trust game experiment (Vineeta Singh)

posted Aug 20, 2015, 6:36 PM by Vineeta Singh   [ updated Aug 20, 2015, 8:35 PM ]
The purpose of this article was to test whether or not people with Parkinson's disease have the same level of trust as people who are not affected by this disease. The article talks about how since the parts of the brain responsible for trust are the same parts that deteriorate when a person is affected with Parkinson's disease, the authors suspected that there would be a significant difference in the trust levels of people with the disease and people without it. The authors hypothesized that people with Parkinson's disease would have lower trust levels than people who aren't affected. In order to test this hypothesis a trust game was developed. For this game they had two subject pools; people with Parkinson's disease and people without it. Both subject groups were put in front of a computer and played series of rounds of the trust game. The game was made to test the trust levels of the person playing. In round 1, the participant would get $10 and they were given a choice as to whether or not they would gamble and give all the money to somebody through the computer or keep the money. They were told that the person they gave money to could either give back double the money and keep half of it themselves or keep everything for themselves. This game was played for many rounds and at the end the results of the game were tallied up. The results of this experiment showed that people with Parkinson's disease were less likely to gamble and give money away. This confirmed the authors' hypothesis that people affected with Parkinson's disease have lower trust levels than those not affected with it.

Javor, Andrija, Riedl, Rene, Kirchmayr, Matthias, Reichenberger, Ransmayr, Gerhard. "Trust behavior in Parkinson's disease:results of a trust game experiment" BMC Neurology. (2015). Web.
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