Beyond Belief: How Implicit Beliefs Influence Trust

We demonstrate that implicit beliefs influence trust. In an experiment, we induced one of two types of implicit beliefs: entity beliefs about negotiation ability (a belief that negotiation ability is fixed over time), and incremental beliefs about negotiation ability (a belief that negotiation ability can change over time). We find that people induced with entity beliefs maintain trust in their counterpart even after they learn that their counterpart deceived them. Participants in the entity condition ignored and discounted negative information. Participants induced with incremental beliefs, however, significantly decreased trust in their counterpart when they learned that their counterpart had deceived them. In addition to changing how trust is harmed by violations, implicit beliefs are likely to influence the trust recovery process. Implicit beliefs and trust 2 Trust plays a central role in negotiations. With trust, negotiators share information (Bazerman, 2006; Butler, 1999), are more cooperative (Kimmel et al., 1980), and are more likely to reach an agreement (Lewicki, 2006). Through increased information sharing, trust enables negotiators to reach efficient, integrative outcomes (e.g., Maddox, Mullen & Galinsky, 2008; cf. Tutzauer & Roloff, 1988; Thompson, 1991). Despite the importance of trust for negotiators, trust is commonly violated, often by negotiators’ use of deception (Schweitzer & Croson, 1999). In fact, prior work has found that deception pervades negotiations (O’Connor & Carnevale, 1997; Schweitzer & Croson, 1999; Schweitzer, Brodt, & Croson, 2002). Despite the prevalence of deception in negotiations, important questions remain regarding the relationship between deception and trust. We know little about how deception harms trust and what factors moderate this relationship. Prior trust research has generally assumed that trust violations significantly harm trust (Boyle & Bonacich, 1970; Kramer, 1996; Lewicki, 2006). Recent work, however, has found that in some cases, violations cause surprisingly little harm (e.g., Elangovan et al., 2007; Miller & Rempel, 2004; Boles, Croson & Murnighan, 2000), and that some types of violations are more harmful than others (Kim et al., 2004; Schweitzer, Hershey & Bradlow, 2006). In this paper, we explore the relationship between implicit beliefs (beliefs about whether personality characteristics are fixed or malleable) and reactions to deception. We demonstrate that negotiators’ implicit beliefs significantly influence trust judgments following revealed deception. Specifically, deception harms trust only when negotiators believe that people’s basic characteristics are malleable and therefore subject to updating. When negotiators believe that basic characteristics are fixed, violations have little effect on trust. Implicit beliefs and trust 3