Have you ever opened the door of your rental car during your “dream vacation” only to find that it was filthy inside and the engine rattled loudly? Or perhaps you entered your luxury tropical beach bungalow and discovered that the air conditioning did not work? If so, you are familiar with the feeling of being let down.
If the vacation property we rented was a disappointment, we are more likely to distrust the proprietor of another vacation property, according to a recent study by Annabelle Roberts, Assistant Marketing Professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, Emma Levine, a Charles M. Harper Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago, and Jane Risen, also a Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago.
A similar reaction could be triggered if an Uber driver never showed up or a customer service rep told us something that was incorrect. We transfer that negative experience to the next Uber driver or service rep we deal with.
Roberts says:
“We’re trusting people all the time, whether we think about it that way or not. There are many situations where consumers need to decide whether to trust an unknown person, and they may use previous interactions with other people in similar settings as a reference point.”
How one experience shapes future trust
The researchers carried out 21 studies involving almost 12,000 individuals. They wanted to understand the ripple effect of one experience involving trust.
Ten studies consisted of online games in which paired participants exchanged cash. They had to make trust decisions with various partners.
In eleven studies, the participants were asked to read real-world scenarios. Examples included asking co-workers to keep a secret or lending something to a next-door neighbor. They then had to determine how likely they were to trust somebody else in a similar situation.
After gathering and analyzing all the data from the 21 studies, the researchers explained that people learned attitudes from a single positive or negative trust interaction.
- Participants who dealt with a person who turned out to be trustworthy were more likely to trust other people in comparable interactions in future.
- If the other person turned out to be untrustworthy, participants felt that they had been taken advantage of and were less likely to trust people in future encounters.
They found two reasons for participants’ reactions: emotional and perceptual:
- Emotional
When the reaction was emotional, participants didn’t feel good and wanted to avoid that feeling in future encounters.
- Perceptual
In perceptual reactions, we tend to generalize, that is, view all other Uber drivers or service representatives as part of the same group. If we have an unpleasant experience with one ride-share driver, we often develop negative feelings about other drivers offering similar services from that moment onwards. This is because we have a tendency to view the driver who gave us a negative experience and other ride-share drivers as part of a group.
Roberts explained:
“You’re updating your beliefs about the population with each interaction that you have.”
Distrust Grows Faster than Trust
The study showed that it is harder to dispel bad experiences. Distrust after a bad consumer experience was found to rise about twice as fast as trust after a good experience.
If the service provider had exploited the consumer’s trust, distrust was particularly strong—in other words, they trusted another person, but later discovered that their trust was misplaced.
The study focused on individual people rather than companies and other organizations. However, customer service departments may learn valuable lessons from the findings. If you have a customer who remains suspicious, it could be because they had a disappointing interaction with others.
Roberts explained:
“If you’re a business owner and someone is untrusting of you, it’s not necessarily a reflection of anything you’ve done. It may be that their perception of you is colored by interactions they had in the past with businesses like yours.”
Interestingly, the same effects don’t seem to occur with AI (artificial intelligence). When people were paired with algorithms in games, there was no decline in their trust, even if the algorithm deprived them of all their money and did not return any of it.
Roberts said:
“This trust effect is specific to social interactions. People don’t lump AI agents together, because they don’t see those interactions as social.”
Citation
Roberts, A. R., Levine, E. E., & Risen, J. L. (2026). Learning to distrust: One trust experience changes the expected value of trust. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 125, 104930. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2026.104930
