USC researcher Peter H. Kim on why integrity breaches are hardest to repair

Dr. Peter H. Kim, a professor of management and organization at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, told host Laurie Murphy that trust depends not only on behavior but on how people perceive competence, integrity and power. "A widespread definition of trust in my field is a willingness to make oneself vulnerable to another based on positive expectations in situations involving risk," he said.

Kim said social cues and prior perceptions often outweigh objective facts when people judge trustworthiness. He explained that competence information tends to produce a "positive bias" (one strong success can outweigh later failures), whereas integrity violations carry a "negative bias," making them persistently diagnostic. "If you are caught embezzling once and you don't embezzle…