Suppose you lend a friend a DVD to watch on the agreement that he will mail it back to Netflix. If you find out your friend forgot to return the movie to the rental company, would you trust him with another DVD?
Now imagine the same scenario, but this time your friend tells you he sent back the movie, when in fact he didn't. You discover he lied when you see the DVD on top of his TV. Even if your friend apologizes and promises to follow through next time, would you lend him a movie again?
The intertwining issues of trust, deception, apologies and promises are explored in a new research paper by three Wharton professors who came up with a unique laboratory experiment to see what happens when trust breaks down. The paper, "Promises and Lies: Restoring Violated Trust," will be published in an upcoming issue of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
DVD rentals aren't the focus of the paper, but co-author Maurice E. Schweitzer, professor of operations and information management, offers the video example to illustrate how trust and trust violations influence people's behavior whether in the workplace or everyday life. "Trust is the social glue that holds things together. It allows us to engage in social and commercial ventures," Schweitzer says. "You can't contract everything. We develop relationships that are based on trusting that things will work out."
To study the dynamics of trust, trust violations and restoration of trust, he and colleagues John C. Hershey, professor of operations and information management, and Eric T. Bradlow, professor of marketing, set up a money game that allowed them to measure changes in trust over time, rather than simply at a single point in time. The researchers said they began the experiment with a widely held assumption -- that trust is fragile, easily broken and hard to repair.
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