Maurice Schweitzer

Schweitzer’s research shows that broken trust can be rebuilt. In his words: “The thought was that trust is like glass. But that isn’t true.” In one experiment, 262 people played a real-money game that tested how far they would trust a partner. When the partner broke that trust, an apology on its own did little. A promise, followed by trustworthy behavior, brought trust back faster. When the partner had lied, trust came back more slowly. For organizations, his Harvard Business Review article on corporate apologies poses four questions. Was there a violation? Was it core to our promise or mission? How will the public react? Are we committed to change? Audiences learn what to do in the first days after trust slips, with a client or inside a team.

Anxiety, a looming target, or a bad mood can each tilt a decision. Schweitzer leads Wharton’s five-day Effective Decision Making program for executives, and this talk brings its core lessons to a wider audience. It covers the common biases behind costly mistakes, and how to combine advice from several people, or a whole group, into one sound decision. He ends with the pre-mortem: the team imagines its plan has already failed, works out why, and fixes what it finds before committing.

A message can fail in three places: it never gets attention, it gets misunderstood, or nobody acts on it. Schweitzer shows audiences how to get past each one. His research on humor fits here: in eight experiments, he and his co-authors found that a joke that lands raises the joke-teller’s standing, and an inappropriate one lowers it. Then he turns to listening: what to ask, how to keep information flowing, and how to listen so people keep talking. He closes on how to prepare for the conversations that matter most.

People skip hard questions because they expect to pay a price for asking, and problems stay hidden as a result. For teams working on candor and psychological safety, his research shows that the fear is often overblown. In one study, people avoided sensitive questions even when they were paid to ask them, and the people they asked minded far less than expected. The talk also covers the other side of the table. If someone asks a question you should not answer, his research suggests answering with a question of your own. In his studies, that cost people less than refusing to answer, and it was less risky than lying. Audiences come away with wording for both sides of the conversation.

Schweitzer teaches negotiation in four stages: preparing, gathering information, exchanging offers, and closing. A first offer tends to anchor the deal, and he covers how to time it. His research also shows that anxious negotiators make weaker first offers and walk away sooner. In many deals, especially for services, much of the value comes after signing, and pushing too hard on price can hurt the relationship that delivers it. As he puts it, “We don’t hammer away at our babysitters, squeezing every quarter we can.”

Colleagues and partners are often allies on some days and rivals on others. Drawing on Friend & Foe, his book with Adam Galinsky, Schweitzer shows how to succeed in both roles. Scarce resources, new information, and shifts in status can turn an ally into a rival quickly, and comparison with peers can speed the change. The talk helps audiences read which mode a relationship is in, and respond to it on purpose.

Emotions carry over from one moment to the next, often without anyone noticing. In Schweitzer’s research, people who felt grateful became more willing to trust, even when the gratitude came from something unrelated, and people who felt angry trusted less. Four of his studies found that anger from an unrelated event also made people more willing to deceive, while sadness had no such effect. He treats emotional intelligence as a practical skill: knowing what emotions do to judgment, and managing them before a negotiation, a hard conversation, or a high-stakes decision.

In an experiment Schweitzer led, people with unmet goals were more likely to act unethically than people asked simply to do their best. The effect was strongest when they fell just short of the goal. His article “Goals Gone Wild,” written with three colleagues, traces the same pattern in organizations. He helps audiences set targets that still motivate, and notice when a target is driving the decision.

Schweitzer also runs working sessions that last from two hours to a full day. Participants do a short exercise first, and he draws the lessons out of what just happened. His negotiation workshop has people pair up and negotiate a case for about 20 minutes, and it scales to large groups. His trust simulation, an immersive, computer-based exercise he runs at Wharton several times a year, takes two to three hours and can run online. A pre-mortem session puts a team’s real decision through the exercise before the team commits to it.