14 DAY TRIAL // For a long time, scientists have been saying that making an apology is the first step in the reconciliation process between two people. But a new investigation shows that most individuals are not very good at predicting how they will react to an apology, and how much value they will put on it.
This type of investigation was prompted by the slew of apologies that the general public in the United States was subjected to following a large number of scandals. The Enron fiasco and the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme brought a lot of apologies to TV sets around the country.
When the financial crisis began unraveling, people were fuming mad at the banks for their reckless behavior, but the banks, corporations and CEOs involved in nefarious deals did not feel they were guilty, and did not apologize as a result.
When some of them did do so, the public didn't care much for it, and this prompted Dr. David De Cremer, an expert at the Erasmus University in the Netherlands, to wonder about the real value of an apology, PsychCentral reports.
Experts Dr, Chris Reinders Folmer, also from the Erasmus University and Dr Madan M. Pillutla, who is based at the London Business School, coauthored the new investigation, which is published in the latest issue of the journal Psychological Science.
In order to gain more insight into the human mind on this issue, the team set up a series of experiments to determine how much people valued apologies in general. Test participants were given 10 euros, and then asked to communication with a partner via computer.
Each subject could decide whether to keep or give the money away to their chat partner. If they gave the money away, their partners received 30 euros. Then the people at the other computer could decide to give money back. When they did, they only gave back 5 euros.
Half of the test subjects then received an apology for this poor treatment, whereas the other half was told to imagine it had received one. The study showed that people who imagined the apology valued it more than those who actually got it.
This implies that people cannot really figure out what steps are needed to properly resolve conflicts that occur on a daily basis. “I think an apology is a first step in the reconciliation process. [But] you need to show that you will do something else,” De Cremer explains.