Interpersonal trust is crucial for organizations, allowing members to build meaningful relationships, communicate easily and collaborate. We investigated how it is affected by experiencing learned helplessness (LH). LH (reviewed in Maier & Seligman, 2016) occurs when a person learns that their actions and outcomes are non-contingent. For example, organizational members may "learn" that regardless of their efforts they cannot solve organizational tasks. Our model identified two reactions to LH situations, yielding opposite implications for interpersonal trust. Individuals may "give up" and succumb to the notion of non-contingency, consequently experiencing a need to cling on to others, thus increasing their interpersonal trust. Alternatively, they may perceive their actions and outcomes as temporarily non-contingent because something in the situation is wrong and "keep trying", thus expressing resilience, and consequently decrease their trust in others. In Studies 1 and 2 we manipulated an LH situation by presenting the participants with non-solvable tasks. We hypothesized that trust correlates positively with succumbing and negatively with resilience in the LH condition, but not in the control. The hypothesis was confirmed when the reaction to LH was assessed subjectively (Study 1) and behaviorally (Study 2). Study 3 investigated COVID-19 as an LH situation, manipulating the interpretation of COVID-19 in terms of succumbing versus resilience. As hypothesized, among those who perceived COVID-19 as dangerous, trust was higher for those in the succumbing (versus resilience) condition. In conclusion, succumbing to LH increases interpersonal trust whereas those who express resilience pay a price, in decreased trust in others.
