Why Relationships Matter

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Strong relationships are not just smooth and salubrious. Small failures keep getting repaired.

The aggrieved party minimizes the effect of the lapse through biased cognitive processing.

The more salubrious form of this process works only for minor failures, and with trust already in place.

Think of a strong relationship, with a person, a company, or an organization at work. Its strength is not that fewer things go wrong. People can be inattentive, colleagues are abrupt, companies make mistakes, and now and then a product we trust disappoints us. What is remarkable in a strong relationship is that some of these lapses get repaired, and even more remarkable is the fact that the person doing the repairing is often the person who was wronged.

Take a colleague you have worked with closely for years. You trust her judgment and expect to keep working together. One day she dismisses something you say too quickly, or is unusually short with you. You notice this, and it bothers you in the moment, but almost right away it starts to get explained away. She has had a hard week. That is not how she normally behaves. I probably caught her at a bad moment.

The same thing happens with companies. I have been loyal to a couple of airlines over the years. When I meet an employee of one of these airlines who is unusually unhelpful, I have the option of treating the encounter as evidence about the airline (a moment of truth, as it might be called), or I might find a way to localize the experience as stemming from one employee, on one day, at an airline I have had a good history with. I still notice the bad experience, but, sometimes implicitly and sometimes quite deliberately, I find a way to minimize........

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