Trust is a critical social process that helps us to cooperate with others and is present to some degree in all human interaction. However, the underlying brain mechanisms of conditional and unconditional trust in social reciprocal exchange are still obscure. Here, we used hyperfunctional magnetic resonance imaging, in which two strangers interacted online with one another in a sequential reciprocal trust game while their brains were simultaneously scanned. By designing a nonanonymous, alternating multiround game, trust became bidirectional, and we were able to quantify partnership building and maintenance. Using within-and between-brain analyses, an examination of functional brain activity supports the hypothesis that the preferential activation of different neuronal systems implements these two trust strategies. We show that the paracingulate cortex is critically involved in building a trust relationship by inferring another person's intentions to predict subsequent behavior. This more recently evolved brain region can be differently engaged to interact with more primitive neural systems in maintaining conditional and unconditional trust in a partnership. Conditional trust selectively activated the ventral tegmental area, a region linked to the evaluation of expected and realized reward, whereas unconditional trust selectively activated the septal area, a region linked to social attachment behavior. The interplay of these neural systems supports reciprocal exchange that operates beyond the immediate spheres of kinship, one of the distinguishing features of the human species.U nlike other species, humans are trustful and cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers, with individuals they will never meet again, or even when reputation and gains are absent (1, 2). Recent studies in experimental economics and social neuroscience have started to explore the neurobiology of trust (2-6) and cooperation (7-10) in reciprocal exchange. Reciprocal behavior allows the formation of partnerships that can produce mutual advantages for cooperators and thus can be selected for maximizing evolutionary fitness (11). Reciprocity generally involves a first mover who must trust another person to give the other person an opportunity to reciprocate (12). Typically in a partnership, the person who moves first will vary frequently. In laboratory experiments, trusting behavior can be reliably reproduced (13, 14) although with significant individual variation with respect to both experience (3, 15) and context (5, 16).In this paper we look at first movers' decisions to trust. Trusting is always risky given the unpredictability of the intentions of the partner in a social exchange (17). A trust relationship is built on each partner's decisions to trust and reciprocate. To build a trust relationship, partners must learn that they can depend on each other. One model of this process is the goodwill accounting model (18), which is based on the empirical practice of taking into account the value of ongoing partnerships. Partners accumulate go...