Justifying one’s transgressions: How rationalizations based on equity, equality, and need affect trust after its violation.

Abstract

We investigate how efforts to justify a transgression as an attempt to address matters of equity, equality, or need would affect the implications of an apology for trust after its violation, and how this would depend on the intended beneficiary. To do so, we conducted 2 studies, including a new research design that supplements the rigor of experiments with far greater realism. Although combining a justification with an apology tended to elicit higher trust relative to an apology alone when the violation benefited another party, doing so was ineffective or harmful when the violation benefited the violator. Finer-grained analyses comparing the 3 types of justifications, furthermore, revealed that the addition of equity-based justifications elicited higher trust than the addition of equality- or need-based justifications in general, and that the addition of need-based justifications was particularly harmful when the violation benefited the self. Perceived fairness mediated these effects.