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 the next day, you're still an embezzler in the eyes of others," Kim said.

That difference, Kim argued, helps explain why standard remedies for broken trust are unevenly effective. Apologies, full responsibility and subsequent reparative acts can be helpful after competence-related failures but are frequently ineffective for integrity breaches because an apology also "confirms guilt." "The downside of an apology is that it also confirms guilt," he said, adding that the same apology that might help after a competence lapse can be harmful after an integrity lapse.

Kim described two practical avenues for repairing damaged trust in some cases: changing the narrative to show the incident reflects competence rather than integrity, and bringing forward impartial or neutral third parties to validate that reframing. He noted these are not easy solutions: "People tend to make very snap judgments... and they don't necessarily gather all the relevant evidence to really understand why something might have happened."

Discussing group dynamics, Kim said in-group favoritism and shared opinion-amplification (the "hive mind") make reconciling conflicts across groups harder. "People who are in our groups, we see in more favorable terms than people outside our groups," he said, adding that exchanging opinions within like-minded groups tends to make views more extreme.

For leaders, Kim recommended explaining constraints and reducing perceptions of volition when possible. He said failing to explain decisions often prompts others to "fill in the blanks" with negative attributions, while clarifying that actions were constrained by circumstance can mitigate judgments of low integrity.

Despite the challenges, Kim offered a hopeful note: people are often more trusting than pessimists assume, and trusting behavior can create a self-fulfilling prophecy of reciprocal trust. "When you are trusting of others, you create a self fulfilling prophecy," he said. "Most people, when you trust them, they are trustworthy in return, and those who are more inclined to trust wind up being happier at the end."

The conversation and examples are drawn from Kim's book How Trust Works: The Science of How Relationships Are Built, Broken, and Repaired. Kim pointed listeners to peterhkim.com and his USC Marshall School of Business profile for more information. The episode was produced by the Federal Judicial Center's In Session: Leading the Judiciary podcast.