Peter H. Kim, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, has spent two decades studying trust and trust repair. In his new book, How Trust Works: The Science of How Relationships Are Built, Broken, and Repaired, he lays out the surprising truths about trust; the ways in which we make bad decisions about whom to trust; and how we can all do better. His book is not a mere collection of takeaways that can be boiled down into maxims. Instead, he pulls apart different scandals, examining them from one angle, then another.
Fast Company sat down with Kim to chat about his new book and his insights on trust and trust repair. In conversation, Kim is as nuanced and subtle as his book. Over and over, he points out one of the most difficult truths to accept about trust: There are no easy answers.
Fast Company: How did you become a trust researcher?
Peter Kim: It was the product of a lot of self-reflection, as I was going through this journey of becoming a research scientist. I’ve always been interested in how we manage identity as we navigate the world, and trust is a major aspect of that. Also, I was raised Catholic. I’m not practicing now, but I’ve always been interested in stories of guilt and redemption, which led to an interest in how we repair trust when things go wrong.
FC: Walk me through the arc of your research. What did you learn about trust along the way?
PK: My first study on trust was really an attempt to reconcile what seemed to be a contradiction in the literature. There’s a set of studies that basically says when things go wrong you should apologize. And there’s another set that says you’re better off just denying wrongdoing.
The first study I ran found that it depends on the situation. But I got a lot of pushback from reviewers. They didn’t believe the basic premise of the study: [They thought] that in the case of strangers meeting, there wasn’t any trust to be violated. I had run experiments showing that, actually, people have high levels of trust in each other from the get-go, and that trust doesn’t start at zero.
FC: What did you discover about apologies?
PK: Apologies tend to be double-edged in nature. So, an apology will be beneficial in the sense that you’re conveying remorse and signaling redemption, but it is also harmful because it confirms guilt. And so the question becomes, well, what do we weigh more heavily: the signals of guilt, or the signals of redemption?
Trust can be broken down into competence and integrity. So for matters of competence, it turns out that we will focus on those positive signals of redemption. But for integrity violations, an apology is actually quite harmful in many instances, because we tend to focus on the confirmation of guilt rather than redemption. We tend to believe that people with high integrity will never act unethically.
FC: I’ve been dying to ask you this ever since I came across your work. Imagine you did something unethical. Then what are you supposed to do, not apologize?
PK: That is the million-dollar question that’s driven so much of what I’ve explored over time. Once you confirm that negative information about your ethicality, it’s really hard to overcome. I have a partial answer, which is that providing justification can help. If you stole money, but the justification is saving someone’s life, people might be more understanding. The difficult part is that people have different values and priorities, so they might not agree with your justification.
FC: In your book, you have an example where Dolce & Gabbana’s cofounder, Stefano Gabbana, says racist things about Chinese people. The company apologizes, but it doesn’t go over well because the public thinks the company just wants their Chinese customers back. What should have been done differently?
PK: That’s a great question and a tough one. So there were two things going on. Dolce & Gabbana ran a set of culturally insensitive advertisements. Then, private messages with racist comments from the [cofounder] were leaked. The company apologized for both in the same video, but actually, these were two very different issues. The ads could have been chalked up to cultural incompetence, and an apology could have been helpful.
However, the leaked messages from the [cofounder] were an integrity violation. The messages were private, and we believe what is said in private is more representative of a person. We also believe that people in power have their power because they have more emotional control. That means when they express remorse, often we don’t believe them. Gabbana might have tried stepping away from his position to show that he’s no longer in power, and then apologizing, because at that point he has nothing to gain from the apology and it would seem more sincere. Trust repair sometimes does take a real penalty.
FC: What surprised you most about your findings?
PK: How confident and how wrong people are. Deciding whom to trust is one of the most important decisions in an interaction, but we’re inclined to make snap decisions based on incorrect information. This isn’t my own research, but studies have found that in romantic couples, people are often motivated to interpret what might seem like flaws into virtues. We’re actively constructing a narrative that reconstructs questionable behavior in a way that allows us to feel better about the situation and maintain the relationship. But we’re not always motivated to do the same thing with others, particularly people who are different from us, because we have such little stake in maintaining the relationship.
FC: How has your research shaped the way you see the world?
PK: One of my findings is that having an inclination to trust others is a good thing. So that’s a message I take to heart. It is also a reminder to think about situations more carefully before I rush to judgment. And that’s another big theme of the book. It’s not just the violators’ responsibility to address a trust problem, because through our snap judgments and our quick decisions, we are predetermining the results of these trust repair efforts without even realizing it. So we all need to work harder to make sense of these kinds of incidents.
It’s easy for us to infer that other people have low integrity when they don’t do what we want. So we condemn them. And what is the implication of that? We try to impose our value system upon them, and expect them to relent. But if they really have different ethical priorities, they’re not going to relent. They will try to impose their views on us. So we talk past one another. How do we get to the point where we’re actually engaging in that conversation? It can take a long time—months, maybe years, depending on the situation. But when you reach those moments, that’s when real progress can be made.
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