trust violation
Definition
Trust violation refers to acts by political leaders that breach the expectations of honesty, integrity, and promise-keeping on which public confidence depends, encompassing dishonesty, corruption, lies, and broken promises. In the context of the 2024 UK General Election, such violations were examined longitudinally across voters of four major parties to assess how willingness to forgive shifted before and after the election outcome. Pre-election levels of trust functioned as a buffer, shaping how voters interpreted violations: higher prior trust predicted greater post-election forgiveness of outgroup leaders, but showed no statistically significant relationship with forgiveness of one's own ingroup leader. Ingroup forgiveness operated instead through identity maintenance pressures, a pattern confirmed by the strong ingroup bias in forgiveness observed across all four party groups.
Sources: Lalot & Abrams (2025)
Related Terms
- leadership (1 shared article)
- ingroup outgroup (1 shared article)
- forgiveness (1 shared article)
- transgression credit (1 shared article)
Applications
Trust Violation and Partisan Forgiveness
Voters across all four main parties in the 2024 UK General Election were significantly more willing to forgive trust violations committed by their own leader than by outgroup leaders, with a partial eta-squared of .26 indicating a large effect of ingroup bias. This asymmetry suggests that partisan identity, rather than an objective assessment of the transgression, drives forgiveness decisions.
Sources: Lalot & Abrams (2025)
Trust Violation and Transgression Credit
Transgression credit is the willingness of group members to excuse errant ingroup leadership, and trust violations are the specific transgressions to which this leniency is applied. In the 2024 UK election study, this credit extended to both the winning and losing mainstream party leaders after the election, but was absent for the populist leader Nigel Farage, pointing to boundary conditions on when ingroup status protects a leader from accountability.
Sources: Lalot & Abrams (2025)
Trust Violation and Group Identification
Party identification was negatively associated with forgiveness of outgroup leaders following trust violations, while national identification, conceived as a superordinate identity encompassing both ingroup and outgroup, was positively associated with such forgiveness. Pre-election trust predicted outgroup forgiveness but not ingroup forgiveness, indicating that identification and prior trust operate through distinct mechanisms depending on whether the transgressing leader is perceived as one's own or a rival.
Sources: Lalot & Abrams (2025)
