UK national guidelines recommend how healthcare professionals should communicate with patients. However, the impact of following, or violating, these guidelines on how much the healthcare professional is respected, liked, or trusted, and the mechanisms underpinning, and consequences of, these perceptions have not been tested. To address these gaps, two UK-based, pre-registered studies using within-subjects designs required participants to rate how much they respect, like and trust general practitioners (GPs), as well as how competent, assertive, moral, and warm they are, and their commitment to adhere to their advice. After these baseline assessments, participants were presented with a series of vignettes where hypothetical GPs violated (Study 1,