{"id":203490,"date":"2025-01-10T04:49:49","date_gmt":"2025-01-10T10:49:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/trust-paradox-benefiting-from-betrayal-doesnt-always-erode-trust"},"modified":"2025-01-10T04:49:49","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T10:49:49","slug":"trust-paradox-benefiting-from-betrayal-doesnt-always-erode-trust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/trust-paradox-benefiting-from-betrayal-doesnt-always-erode-trust","title":{"rendered":"Trust paradox: Benefiting from betrayal doesn\u2019t always erode trust"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/trust-paradox-benefiting-from-betrayal-doesnt-always-erode-trust2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Imagine this scenario: Two people cheat on their partners with each other and then leave their partners to be together. Should they trust each other, or \u201conce a cheater, always a cheater\u201d?<\/p>\n<p>Intuition and past research suggest that whether people deem someone trustworthy depends on that person\u2019s past behavior and reputation for <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/betrayal\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">betrayal<\/a>. But now, new work from psychologists at UCLA and Oklahoma State University is helping to explain why people might nevertheless trust certain cheaters and other betrayers.<\/p>\n<p>When we benefit from someone\u2019s betrayal, we tend to still regard that person as inherently trustworthy, the psychologists reported in a study <a href=\"https:\/\/linkinghub.elsevier.com\/retrieve\/pii\/S1090513824001247\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Evolution and Human Behavior<\/i>. Their experiments found that although subjects tended to regard people who betrayed others as generally less trustworthy, when a person\u2019s betrayal benefited the subject, that person was still thought to be worthy of trust.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Imagine this scenario: Two people cheat on their partners with each other and then leave their partners to be together. Should they trust each other, or \u201conce a cheater, always a cheater\u201d? Intuition and past research suggest that whether people deem someone trustworthy depends on that person\u2019s past behavior and reputation for betrayal. But now, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[385],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-203490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}