Graebner takes a dyadic view, giving equal weight to buyer and seller, and finds their views of each other are systematically asymmetric. Each side forms beliefs about whether the counterpart is trustworthy and about whether the counterpart trusts them, and those beliefs are frequently wrong in both directions. Out of that asymmetry come two behaviors that feed each other: a tendency to behave deceptively, and a tendency to guard against deception.
The mechanism behind the central finding is uncomfortable and simple. Trust substitutes for protection. An owner who believes the buyer is honourable negotiates fewer safeguards, accepts vaguer commitments about employees and the future of the business, and does less verification. If the trust is well founded, nothing is lost. If it is not, the owner has removed exactly the protections that existed for this case. Trust is not the problem; using trust in place of terms is.
The Institute reads this as an argument for a specific discipline rather than for cynicism. You may like your buyer, and liking them is a legitimate input into who you sell to, particularly if you care what happens to your people. Just do not let it substitute for the written commitments, the diligence and the counsel you would have insisted on with a buyer you did not like. Put differently: choose warmly, and paper it coldly.
Read directly against Graebner and Eisenhardt’s own courtship study on this shelf, which shows sellers being genuinely pulled toward buyers offering organizational rapport, and finding that trade worth making. The two are not contradictory so much as sequential: rapport is a reasonable basis for choosing whom to negotiate with, and a terrible basis for deciding how carefully to negotiate.