Effect of relationship experience on trust recovery following a breach

Significance

Will people be more likely to forgive a breach of trust in an earlier or later stage of an interpersonal relationship? The present article reports behavioral and neurophysiological experiments that speak to this important question. Results show that trust recovery is facilitated with increasing relationship experience. Differential activation in the controlled social cognition system (C-system) and the automatic social cognition system (X-system) indicate that decision making is less controlled and more automatic following a later as opposed to an earlier trust breach. These findings have important implications for the study of trust recovery after a breach, as well as the neuroscience of trust.