Trust promotes unethical behavior: excessive trust, opportunistic exploitation, and strategic exploitation

• Trust enables unethical behavior.
• Targets often misplace trust because they focus on the wrong cues.
• Exploiters take advantage of trusting targets opportunistically and strategically.
• The link between trust and unethical behavior has been overlooked in the literature.

Trust is critical for our cooperation and effective working relationships, but trust also enables exploitation and unethical behavior. Prior trust research has disproportionately focused on the benefits of trust, even though some of the most egregious unethical behaviors occur because of misplaced trust. Targets of exploitation misplace their trust, because they rely on the wrong cues and are exploited by people who either opportunistically or strategically take advantage of their trust. We call for future work to explore the critical link between trust and unethical behavior.