14 DAY TRIAL // Everyone knows that lack of trust and confidence can be the downfall of an otherwise solid relationship, but popular culture, such as Hollywood movies, shows us that sometimes even the worse left-foot starts can be the beginning of something beautiful. A new research thoroughly dismisses that hypothesis and argues that confidence deceived early in a relation creates situations that are much harder to fix than those that may occur later on, after solid bounds have already been established.
“First impressions matter when you want to build a lasting trust. If you get off on the wrong foot, the relationship may never be completely right again. It’s easier to rebuild trust after a breach if you already have a strong relationship. Our results fly in the face of this Hollywood notion of hating someone at first sight but then developing a wonderful, passionate relationship. The likelihood of that happening in real life is pretty low,” says study co-author Robert Lount, who is an Ohio State University Fisher College of Business assistant professor of management and human resources.
The paper, published recently in the famous journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, also shows that test subjects rated partners lower if they had their trust broken early in the relationship. To test his theory, Lount used a psychological quiz named “game theory,” in which participants have to rely on each other, in order to obtain the largest rewards. In reality, those who took part in the tests were paired with computers, but thought they played against partners in another room.
“Our results suggest that immediate breaches are especially costly because they seriously damage the impressions people have about their partner, and that’s hard to repair,” Lount says, adding that all subjects in his experiments were deceived only twice by computers, but that the timing of that action was crucial in the students who attended forming an opinion about the alleged partner in the other room.