The science behind repairing trust – Interview with Professor Peter Kim

October 31, 2023

Today’s interview is with Dr. Peter Kim, Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business and author of a newly published book called How Trust Works: The Science of How Relationships Are Built, Broken, and Repaired. Peter joins me today on the podcast to talk about his new book, the different elements of trust, how we think trust operates and how most of us choose to trust in real life, why we’re more likely to forgive what we perceive as a blunder in competence than a lapse in integrity and what we should do when trust is broken.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The five barriers to digital transformation and a roadmap to overcome them – Interview with David Rogers – and is number 483 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my conversation with Peter:

We all know how important trust is to us and what it’s like when trust is broken. But even so, we know surprisingly little about this topic from a scientific standpoint.
Despite the critical role trust plays in all of our lives, we are quite terrible at making judgments about trust. Simple differences in wording, idiosyncratic features of the situation, and signals that have very little to do with the trustworthiness of the target we are evaluating can make a dramatic difference in the trust we exhibit. And our reactions to those seeking to repair trust after a violation, quite often discourage the kinds of responses we want most.
So, if trust is as important to us as we claim, we really need to get better at managing it.
The three bases of trust can be categorized as things that concern elements of the situation that you’re in.
- The first being that when you’re interacting with others, do you believe that the incentives are in place for them to behave in a trustworthy way?
- The second reason why we might trust stems from our own dispositions. So some of us are inherently more inclined to trust others due to our personality traits.
- The third basis of trust gets closer to what most of us think about when we think about how trust is formed. It gets to the characteristics of the person or company we might be relating to. Studies have identified as many as 10 different characteristics that may be relevant and in different situations, some of those characteristics may be more important than others. But the issue here is that a lot of times times we make inferences about those characteristics before real information about those characteristics is available.
Those who are more inclined to trust wind up being happier and more successful because that kind of inclination opens us up to experiences. We wind up being more attractive relationship partners with others, and it encourages productive and constructive action. So if we trust that things will go well and that the people will treat us well, we’re more inclined to make the investments in those relationships that typically pay off. So in general, there is a benefit to trusting others.
We’d like to think that interviews are a good way to gauge another person, but the evidence suggests that interviews are quite unreliable.
One of the most common assumptions we hold is that our trust starts at zero and only builds gradually over time as we learn more about one another. We also assume this is prudent and rational.
A lot of our beliefs about how things should work are based on things in our mental basements, things that are the product of our evolutionary history that still exert a major influence in how we make judgments today.
One of the implications of these quirks is that we tend to weigh matters of competence and integrity quite differently. It turns out for matters of competence, we have this asymmetry that leads us to weigh positive information about competence much more heavily than negative information about competence.
But for matters of integrity that asymmetry is reversed. We tend to weigh negative information about integrity much more heavily than positive information about integrity.
These asymmetries are important because any attempt to repair trust after a violation are double edged in nature. They convey both negative information about guilt, let’s say an apology. It conveys both negative information about guilt and positive information about intended redemption. You’re going to try to fix this moving forward. And that means for competence-based violations, an apology would be helpful because we’re going to discount the negative information about guilt relative to the positive signals that you’re conveying about intending to fix this moving forward. But for matters of integrity, that same apology will have the opposite effect because that confirmation of guilt for an integrity-based violation will be considered extremely diagnostic. It’ll be seen as a signal that you really are a bad person, and the accompanying signals that you’re going to fix this moving forward will be discounted.
So the exact same attempt to repair trust can lead to dramatically different reactions and perceivers based on how the violation itself is viewed.
One of the main themes of the book is that we need to move beyond this focus on the response, whether an apology is offered or not. Because so much can be determined by how the violation is viewed and we need to put more stock in that assessment. We need to really think about how we and others are viewing the situation.
Peter’s Punk CX word(s): Probative
Peter’s Punk XL brand: Ganahl Lumber Company

About Peter

Dr. Peter H. Kim is a Professor of Management and Organization at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. He studies the dynamics of social misperception and its implications for negotiations, work groups, and dispute resolution and his research has been published in numerous scholarly journals, received ten national/international awards, and has been featured by the New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR. He serves as a Senior Editor for Organization Science and on the editorial boards for the Academy of Management Review and Negotiation and Conflict Management Research. He is also a past Associate Editor for the Academy of Management Review and the Journal of Trust Research, as well as past Chair of the Academy of Management’s Conflict Management Division. He is the author of How Trust Works: The Science of How Relationships Are Built, Broken, and Repaired (on sale Aug. 15, 2023 from Flatiron Books).