Trust Repair Under Social Surveillance: Behavioral and Neural Evidence for Reputational Buffering

Trust repair requires victims to evaluate both the adequacy of a transgressor's restitution and the social meaning of their response. This research examined whether cues of social surveillance alter the processing of financial compensation after trust violations. Across two experiments using a modified Trust Game, we tested the behavioral and neural effects of eye cues and compensation levels. Experiment 1 showed that eye cues and compensation independently promoted behavioral trust repair. Equal compensation and overcompensation produced greater repair than undercompensation, whereas overcompensation provided no additional benefit beyond equal compensation, indicating a ceiling effect of monetary repair. Experiment 2 extended the additive behavioral effects and used event-related potentials to examine the temporal dynamics of repair evaluation. Eye cues delayed N1 responses to undercompensation, suggesting early attentional conflict when inadequate restitution occurred in a socially evaluative context. Eye cues also enhanced P2 amplitudes, indicating rapid detection of social salience. Critically, undercompensation elicited a more negative feedback-related negativity (FRN) than equal compensation in the control condition, but this difference disappeared in the eye-cue condition. This pattern is consistent with a reputational buffering account, whereby social surveillance attenuates the negative neural valuation of inadequate compensation. In the late positive potential (LPP) window, eye cues and undercompensation produced additive patterns, consistent with additive late elaboration and final behavioral judgments. Taken together, these findings are consistent with the idea that social surveillance buffers the negative valuation of inadequate compensation during intermediate outcome processing, while later elaborative stages integrate social and monetary information in an additive fashion.