The Impact Of Financial Compensation On Trust Repair Under Gossip Conditions

The study of trust repair is in nearly 10 years to get the researchers’ interest, with the deepening of the study, the researchers in the field of trust repair has got some consensus. Trust is very fragile and easily influenced by other factors, and even destroyed (trust violation). But after violation, there are also have a variety of means and strategies can make it at least to a certain extent even completely repair, such as emotional rehabilitation strategy, functional restoration strategy and information strategy, etc. Emotional repair strategies include the apology, deny, commitment, etc.; Function restoration strategy including mortgage, financial compensation, etc.; Information restoration strategy includes provide public trust, clarify the facts and evidence against event handler and progress. According to different trust violation type, the best repair method is also different. Such as the type for integrity violation, the effect of deny is better than an apology; apologize for a competency-based violation, is better than deny. In the environment of economic exchange, economic compensation is proved to be an effective method of trust repair. But almost all existing scholars in this filed to do the experiment is in purely economic environment experiments, and in the real interpersonal communication, there are many other factors interfere with our judgment. Normally we would be looking for some information to be as a reference if we want to communicate with somebody. When people cannot get the most objective information directly (such as observe), we will use gossip to help us determine whether the people we should trust. Therefore, we want to find out the impact of financial compensation on trust repair under gossip conditions.This research adopts the trust game as basic research paradigm. We use the unfair return on investment to violate the trust of the subjects, and present the different gossip to control the experiment background, and provide financial compensation under the different experiments background for discussing the financial compensation effects on trust repair.This study consists of three experiments. Experiment 1 consisted of 4 conditions:2 (Whether to provide financial compensation)×2 (Whether to provide negative gossip),we discussed the financial compensation effect under negative gossip. Experiment 2 consisted of 6 conditions:2(Whether to provide financial compensation) ×3 (Property of gossip:positive, negative, no gossip), we discussed the effect of financial compensation under different conditions of gossip. Experiment 3 consisted of 10 conditions:2(Whether to provide financial compensation)×5(Property of gossip:ppp,ppn,pnn,nnn,no gossip), we discussed the effect of financial compensation under various mixed property of the gossip, because in the real life gossip generally not all consistent.We found that:(1) Economic compensation under the background of different gossip have different effect;(2) Positive gossip can promote the effect of economic compensation, and the more positive gossip, the effect is better. Negative gossip could reduce the effect of economic compensation, and the more negative gossip, effect is poorer;(3) When there is no economic compensation,the effect of negative gossip is greater than to provide compensation, when we provide economic compensation, the effect of positive gossip is more than no compensation;(4) The malicious intent of the trustee is significantly negative correlation with trust repair effect;(5) Gossip will affect the types of trust violation:the more negative gossip, the more truster to think the intentions of the trustee is negative, the violate type is the more likely to be integrity-based violate; More negative gossip,the more truster to think the intention of the trustee is more positive, the violates type is the more likely to be competency-based violate.(6) Because of the economic compensation carries certain apologies signal, the effect of economic compensation for a competency-based violate (positive gossip) is better than foe a competency-based violate (negative gossip).To sum up, in the context of gossip, the effect of financial compensation for trust repair will be varies due to the property gossip, furthermore, we try to find out why is this so, so that this study can provides a reference for applying the financial compensation effectively to repair trust in practice.