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Restoring trust harder when broken early in relationship

January 22, 2009

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.

Looking for extraterrestrial life in all the right places

January 8, 2009

Scientists are expanding the search for extraterrestrial life — and they’ve set their sights on some decidedly unearthly planets.

Cold “super-Earths” — giant, “snowball” planets that astronomers have spied on the outskirts of faraway solar systems — could potentially support some kind of life, the scientists have found.

Such planets are plentiful; experts estimate that one-third of all solar systems contain super-Earths.

“We know there are a lot of super-Earths out there, and the next generation of telescopes will be even better at spotting them,” said Scott Gaudi, assistant professor of astronomy at Ohio State.

Despite the name, a super-Earth has little in common with the Earth that we know — other than the fact it has a solid surface. A super-Earth is covered with ice and may have a substantial atmosphere — perhaps much thicker than the Earth’s.

Yet Gaudi joined with Eric Gaidos of the University of Hawaii and Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to model whether such planets might harbor a liquid ocean that could support life and whether they might be detectable from Earth.

Gaidos reported the team’s early results at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco last month.

“It turns out that if super-Earths are young enough, massive enough or have a thick atmosphere, they could have liquid water under the ice or even on the surface,” Gaudi said. “And we will almost certainly be able to detect these habitable planets if they exist.”

The most promising technique for finding super-Earths is the one Gaudi prefers: Gravitational microlensing. When one star happens to cross in front of another as seen from Earth, it magnifies the light from the more distant star like a lens. If planets are orbiting the lens star, they boost the magnification briefly as they pass by.

Gaudi and his colleagues first discussed the project this summer at an Aspen Center for Physics workshop. The workshops are sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and they offer an informal atmosphere for scientists to propose new ideas.

There, the three talked about using microlensing to search for life in a new way.

Most such efforts focus on finding planets in another solar system’s “habitable zone” — the distance from a star where temperatures are just right for supporting liquid water on the surface and, thus, for life as we know it.

But water is much more plentiful beyond the habitable zone, in the outer reaches of a solar system, Gaudi said. It’s most often found as ice — at the heart of gas planets such as Jupiter, on frozen moons such as Europa and on super-Earths. In fact, Earth’s water probably originated elsewhere, and found its way here on comets or asteroids.

So rather than looking for warm planets like Earth that happened to acquire water, Gaudi and his colleagues decided to look at cold super-Earths that formed with water already in place.

They examined the likelihood that some internal heat source might enable liquid water to form under the ice. As Gaidos and Seager modeled scenarios for heating the interior of super-Earths, Gaudi modeled whether the planets they hypothesized would be detectable.

Gaidos and Seager found that very big super-Earths, ones around 10 times the mass of Earth, could retain enough heat from their formation to form a liquid ocean beneath the ice — even though those planets would be located some five times farther from their star than Earth is from its sun.

Gaudi determined that such planets would be detectable. In fact, microlensing is best at detecting planets that far out in a solar system, he said.

As to what type of life might be found there, it’s too early to speculate.

“A more worrisome question is, if these planets have life on them, how would we know it?” he said. “We have a hard enough time trying to figure out whether there’s life on Europa, let alone something that’s hundreds of light years away.”