Breaking the letter vs. spirit of the law: How the interpretation of contract violations affects trust and the management of relationships
通过两个实验，研究了人们如何解释合同违约（违反字面还是精神），发现违反字面更难克服，因为被认为更故意，这影响了信任和关系管理。
Contract violations are ubiquitous. There has been little attention, however, dedicated to understanding the mechanisms involved in making sense of and addressing such occurrences. Two experimental studies investigated how people interpret contract violations and how these interpretations affect trust and the management of relationships. By drawing on the distinction between violations of the letter versus spirit of the law, we show that letter violations are more difficult to overcome than spirit violations, due to higher perceived intentionality. These effects generalized across different populations, levels of contracting experience, types of contracting contexts, levels of ambiguity within the contract, and degrees of contract complexity. The results yield important implications for understanding contract violations, trust, and organizational responses as a relationship management capability . Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.