True repentance helps re-establish trust

Washington: A new study has claimed that true repentance is a critical element to re-establish trust.

According to the study, researchers at USC, Washington University in St. Louis, Singapore Management University and the University of Miami, investigated substantive efforts to repair trust--those responses to trust violations that are more significant than a verbal apology or promises like punishment and regulation. Participants in the US and Singapore took part in four experiments, two of which had participants make a series of trust-related decisions in a game with a virtual partner who would, at a designated point in the match, violate their trust by keeping all the money earned cooperatively in previous rounds. The two other studies, assessed participants’ opinion of a fictional CEO who asked his employees to take a pay cut and failed to follow suit, breaking a promise to refuse dividends from his preferred stock holdings. The researchers concluded that the ability of each method to repair trust hinged on the extent to which the response by the alleged trust violator showed that the violator was truly repentant. The study has been published in journal the Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes. ANI