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Restoring trust harder when broken early in relationship

Posted on | January 22, 2009 | 1,092 views |

by Jeff Grabmeier

In relationships built on trust, a bad first impression can be harder to overcome than a betrayal that occurs after ties are established, a new study suggests.

While betraying trust is never good for a relationship, the results show that early violations can be particularly devastating, planting seeds of doubt that may never go away, said Robert Lount, co-author of the study and assistant professor of management and human resources at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business.

“First impressions matter when you want to build a lasting trust,” Lount said. “If you get off on the wrong foot, the relationship may never be completely right again. It’s easier to rebuild trust after a breach if you already have a strong relationship.”

While the importance of first impressions may seem obvious, Lount said there is still a common theme in popular culture that suggests many great relationships start off badly.

“Our results fly in the face of this Hollywood notion of hating someone at first sight but then developing a wonderful, passionate relationship,” he said. “The likelihood of that happening in real life is pretty low.”

The study appears in a recent issue of the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Lount and his colleagues had college students participate in a game in which their partners violated their trust either right at the beginning of the game or somewhere in the middle.

The goal was to see how much the students were willing to cooperate with the partner after trust was breached.

The researchers used a famous game in psychology called the prisoner’s dilemma. In this version, the two players had to decide separately and privately whether they were going to cooperate with each other or defect against their partner in exchange for a monetary reward.

If they both separately decided to cooperate, they would earn $24 each. If one player decided to defect and the other decided to cooperate, the defector would earn $30, while the person who decided to cooperate would earn only $6. If they both decided to defect, they would both earn $12.

To encourage the participants to take the task seriously, the experimenter announced that several participants would be randomly chosen to receive some of the actual money they won in the game. They also took a tutorial that explained the benefits of cooperation.
In the experiment, 138 students played the game on a computer they were told was networked to a student in another room.

But they were actually playing with a computer programmed to defect at specific points during the more than 30 rounds of the game.

Some participants were paired with a computer that defected against them in the first two rounds of the game, while others defected in rounds 6 and 7 or rounds 11 and 12. In all cases, the computer was programmed to cooperate for 30 rounds following the defection, regardless of what the participant did.

Another group was paired with computers that were programmed to cooperate with the participants throughout the experiment.

Participants were notified on their computer when there were only 10 rounds left in the game.

“The end game is a very critical time, because if you defect, your partner doesn’t have much of an opportunity to get back at you,” Lount said. “If you don’t trust your partner, the last rounds of the game will be when you’re most likely to defect.”

In this experiment, participants who experienced a breach of trust during the first two rounds of the game also were the least likely to cooperate at the end of the game. They cooperated less than 70 percent of the final 10 rounds, suggesting they had the least trust in their partners.

Participants who experienced a trust breach latest in the game — after 10 rounds of cooperation — showed the most cooperation at the end of the game, cooperating more than 90 percent of the time. That was actually higher than participants whose computer partner never defected during the game.

Lount noted that in all cases, the computer defected against the participants the same number of times — just twice during the more than 30 rounds. But the timing of the breaches was key.

Participants who experienced the immediate breach rated their partners as less trustworthy on a questionnaire than did those whose partner defected later in the game.

“Our results suggest that immediate breaches are especially costly because they seriously damage the impressions people have about their partner, and that’s hard to repair,” he said.

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