Trust is widely regarded as being foundational in workplace relationships. The violation of interpersonal trust results in a range of negative affective, cognitive and behavioural consequences for the injured party. However, research has yet to isolate the specific neural areas and processes activated when different types of interpersonal trust are breached. Using electroencephalogram with 68 participants, we identified the effects of three distinct types of trust violations-ability violation, integrity violation and benevolence violationson electrical brain activity. Our findings indicate that trust violations are processed in social cognitive-related brain areas. Specifically, our results identify the significance of the default mode network (DMN), relevant to the processing of social information, in trust violation and further isolated distinct activity for ability, integrity and benevolence trust violation, with integrity violations demonstrating the greatest reaction in the DMN.Benevolence violations generated the next greatest reaction but were not significantly different from the ability violations. This potential distinction may be worth further investigation in future research. Our
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.