Imagine this scenario: two people cheat on their partners and then leave them to be together. Should they trust each other, or “a cheater, always a cheater”?
Intuition and previous research suggest that whether people consider someone trustworthy depends on that person’s past behavior and reputation for betrayal. But now, new work from psychologists at UCLA and Oklahoma State University is helping to explain why people can nonetheless trust certain cheaters and other backstabbers.
When we benefit from someone’s betrayal, we tend to continue to view that person as inherently trustworthy, psychologists reported in a study published in Evolution and human behavior. Their experiments found that, although subjects tended to view people who betrayed others as generally less trustworthy, when a person’s betrayal benefited the subject, that person was still thought to be trustworthy.
What is in question is the role that concepts like “trustworthiness” play in our relationships. According to the research team, inferences about someone’s trustworthiness are used to make adaptive decisions, that is, decisions that benefit us. So while people may be attuned to whether someone has betrayed others in the past, the researchers predicted that people would also be attuned to certain relationship-based factors that affect how one sees or behaves. Trust that person.
“Making decisions about who to trust based solely on whether that person has betrayed another person may not be the best way to determine whether or not I can trust someone,” said study co-author and UCLA psychology professor Jaimie Krems.
“Sure, if someone betrays other people, that could be a valuable signal that they might betray me, but not always. For example, think about that friend who always tells you other friends’ secrets but doesn’t share yours. This one friend is betraying other people but enriching yourself with information,” Krems added.
This was the researchers’ main argument: the mind must be in tune with whether someone has a reputation as a traitor, yes, but also with how someone’s betrayal affects you.
The researchers designed experiments to test whether people considered targets to be more trustworthy when they avoided betrayal, but also when the betrayal had different impacts on the subject.
In a series of experiments, participants were randomly assigned to read one of three vignettes describing their interaction with a target. The first experiment involved sharing secrets between friends, while the second involved romantic infidelity. The third described an interaction in the context of international relations, with participants acting as CIA agents attempting to cultivate a French official as a source.
The targets exhibited one of three behaviors: they did not betray anyone when they had the chance; betrayed another person with the participant or betrayed the participant with another person. For example, some targets did not share a secret, others shared a secret about another person with the participant, and others shared the participant’s secret with a third party. After reading the vignettes, participants rated the target’s trustworthiness on a 7-point scale with questions such as, “I would trust the target to keep my secrets.”
As intuition would predict, across all types of relationships, participants judged targets to be more trustworthy if they did not betray anyone and less trustworthy if they did. But not all people who betrayed were considered equally untrustworthy. When betrayal benefited participants, they still considered the target trustworthy. This pattern was largely consistent across friendships, romantic relationships, and professional relationships.
The findings confirmed the researchers’ hypothesis that trustworthiness judgments are in part a reflection of the person’s disposition and idiosyncratic factors specific to the participant and the person in question.
The findings show that while people may start out with high ideals when it comes to trusting people, what they do in practice is often based more on self-interest.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Key takeaways
- Both intuition and previous research suggest that whether people consider someone trustworthy depends on that person’s past behavior and reputation for betrayal.
- In a series of experiments, psychologists found that subjects considered those who previously exhibited such behavior less trustworthy. However, when the betrayal benefited them or had no effect on them, participants considered the traitor to be trustworthy.
- This pattern was largely consistent across all types of relationships studied: friendships, romantic relationships, and professional relationships.