Incidental Trust Repair: Restoring Trust Through the Kindness of Strangers

This article proposes a process of incidental trust repair focusing on the role of individuals not involved in a trust violation in repairing interpersonal trust. We identify affect and its influence on social perception as mechanisms by which others influence the trust repair process. Results of a mixed-method empirical study supported our main proposition: in the wake of a trust violation, encountering a stranger’s act of kindness enhances a formerly trusting person’s emotional state and facilitates trust repair, doing so by leading them to make more benevolent interpretations of their transgressor’s actions and subsequently increasing their trust. We discuss implications of these findings and our incidental trust repair process for theory, research, and practice, and propose future directions for research.