Management Papers

Document Type

Technical Report

Date of this Version

9-2017

Publication Source

Journal of Business Ethics

Volume

145

Issue

1

Start Page

215

Last Page

225

DOI

10.1007/s10551-017-3649-5

Abstract

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.

Copyright/Permission Statement

This is a pre-print of an article published in the Journal of Business Ethics. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3649-5

Keywords

negotiation, trust, deception, trust dynamics

Download

Share

COinS
 

Date Posted: 25 October 2018

This document has been peer reviewed.