Perceptions of High Integrity Can Persist after Deception: How Implicit Beliefs Moderate Trust Erosion

Scholars have assumed that trust is fragile: difficult to build and easily broken. We demonstrate, however, that in some cases trust is surprisingly robust—even when harmful deception is revealed, some individuals maintain high levels of trust in the deceiver. In this paper, we describe how implicit theories moderate the harmful effects of revealed deception on a key component of trust: perceptions of integrity. In a negotiation context, we show that people who hold incremental theories (beliefs that negotiating abilities are malleable) reduce perceptions of their counterpart’s integrity after they learn that they were deceived, whereas people who hold entity theories (beliefs that negotiators’ characteristics and abilities are fixed) maintain their first impressions after learning that they were deceived. Implicit theories influenced how targets interpreted evidence of deception. Individuals with incremental theories encoded revealed deception as an ethical violation; individuals with entity theories did not. These findings highlight the importance of implicit beliefs in understanding how trust changes over time

Not competent enough to know the difference? Gender stereotypes about women’s ease of being misled predict negotiator deception

We examined whether gender differences in the perceived ease of being misled predict the likelihood of being deceived in distributive negotiations Study 1 ( N= 131) confirmed that female negotiators are perceived as more easily misled than male negotiators This perception corresponded with perceptions of women's relatively low competence Study 2 ( N= 328) manipulated negotiator gender, competence and warmth and found that being perceived as easily misled via low competence affected expectations about the negotiating process, including less deception scrutiny among easily misled negotiators and lower ethical standards among their negotiating counterparts This pattern held true regardless of buyer and seller gender Study 3 ( N= 298) examined whether patterns of deception in face-to-face negotiations were consistent with this gender stereotype As expected, negotiators deceived women more so than men, thus leading women into more deals under false pretenses than me

“I can't lie to your face”: Minimal face-to-face interaction promotes honesty

Scholars have noted that face-to-face (FTF) interaction promotes honesty because it provides opportunities for conversation in which parties exchange information and build rapport. However, it is unclear whether FTF interaction promotes honesty even in the absence of opportunities for back-and-forth conversation. We hypothesized a minimal interaction effect whereby FTF interaction promotes honesty by increasing potential deceivers' consideration of their own moral-interest. To test this account of how FTF interaction may promote honesty, we used a modified version of the deception game (Gneezy, 2005). We found that people were more honest when communicating FTF as opposed to through an intermediary. While FTF interaction tended to promote honesty irrespective of whether it occurred prior to or during the game, the effect was more pronounced when it occurred during the game. The effect of in-game communication medium was mediated by the activation of potential deceivers' moral-interest. We also ruled out alternate accounts involving interpersonal liking, expected counterpart trust, and retaliation fear as honesty-promoting mechanisms. Furthermore, because these effects were not moderated by whether participants had been visually identified during a pre-game interaction, we suggest that our effects are distinct from theoretical accounts involving anonymity. © 2014