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Maurice Schweitzer Addresses the Importance of Truth and Deception in Business

By Stephanie Overby

March 01, 2007 — CIO —

Deception is an integral part of life. Unseemly as it may sound, everybody lies—often several times in one day. There are the little white lies, the sins of omission, outright deception. And none of this is necessarily a bad thing, says Maurice Schweitzer, associate professor of operations and information management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

“Deception is more nuanced that you might initially suspect,” says Schweitzer, who specializes in behavioral decision research. “Your mom might exhort you never to lie and, in the next breath, answer the phone and tell the telemarketer she’s not home right now. We lie all the time.”

Love that sweater! I can’t go out—I’m washing my hair. “A lot of lies we tell are pro-social and help us get along with people better,” says Schweitzer. “Deception is extremely functional and very much a part of the fabric of our lives.”

At the same time, trust is an essential element in all social relationships, including those at work. “Trust is the social glue of the economy. It’s the glue for any transaction,” says Schweitzer. “You can’t contract for everything. Ideally, at the base there is some trust in individuals, groups and institutions.”

Any CIO who’s ever shepherded a big project that came in late, over budget or that simply underdelivered knows just how destructive a broken promise can be to trust between IT and business.

Although trust is a core construct in management literature, the focus of much of that research has been detecting deception. Precious little examines what happens after trust is broken. You spent a million more than expected on that SAP implementation that you swore would revolutionize the enterprise and the ROI is nowhere to be found. Now what?

So Schweitzer, with Wharton colleagues John C. Hershey, professor of operations and information management, and Eric T. Bradlow, professor of marketing, conducted a series of experiments between 2000 and 2004 to uncover what happens at the intersection of deception and trust. Some of the results surprised even Schweitzer. The bad news? Broken trust, when accompanied by deception, is harder to repair. A simple apology does little to reverse the damage. The good news? Trust is less fragile than most of us think. And a promise to change things followed by visible positive actions can go a long way in mending trust.

Schweitzer talked to CIO about his findings and what they can teach the CIO about managing expectations, repairing broken trust and making promises you can’t keep.

 

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