How important is an apology to you? Forecasting errors in evaluating the value of apologies

Do congruent apologies facilitate forgiveness?

Research largely supports the apology–forgiveness cycle, a process in which perpetrators’ post-transgression apologies are reciprocated with victims’ forgiveness. This cycle is often facilitated by the mere provision of an apology. Yet, there are times in which apologies may be rejected. We hypothesised that when apologies matched victims’ apology preferences (i.e., congruent apologies), victims would be more likely to accept them and self-report higher levels of forgiveness. Using an autobiographical transgression-recall approach, participants ( n = 102) provided self-report ratings on the apology they preferred receiving, the severity of the transgression, the type of apology they actually received from perpetrators, whether or not they accepted the apology offered to them, and forgiveness. Victims were more likely to accept apologies and report higher levels of forgiveness when perpetrators offered apologies that were congruent with victims’ preferred apologies, particularly apologies that met victims’ needs for empathy. The findings not only provide support for the apology–forgiveness cycle but also signify the importance of delivering apologies that meet the psychological needs of victims.

In Support of the Medical Apology: The Nonlegal Arguments

BACKGROUND

More than 30 million people are affected annually by medical errors. Apologies can heal patients, families, and providers and, if deployed and structured appropriately, can enrich clinical encounters-yet they rarely occur.

OBJECTIVES

This article will address the nonlegal arguments in favor of the medical apology and discuss a structure for delivering a meaningful apology. In addition, we will review reasons why some providers feel compelled to apologize while others faced with similar circumstances do not.

DISCUSSION

Medical apologies bring value to both patients and providers. Apologies can preserve therapeutic relationships and save careers for professionals by restoring their self-respect and dignity. The four R's of the ideal apology-recognition, responsibility, regret, and remedy-provide a framework to help providers apologize for unintended outcomes. When deployed and structured appropriately, apologies can heal patients, families, and providers and can enrich clinical encounters.

CONCLUSION

For providers, forgiving one's self is key to professional wellbeing and continued effective practice. For patients, apologies are desirable and also serve as a conduit for often wanted emotional support from their physician.

Managing unethical behavior in organizations: The need for a behavioral business ethics approach

Issues of morality and ethics have increasingly become more important in organizations and business settings. Traditionally, these issues of ethics and social responsibility in business settings have been discussed and commented on by prescriptive approaches that are grounded in philosophical traditions. Building on the idea that we need to develop a more comprehensive and complete understanding of the value that people assign to ethics and how it influences their actions and decisions, in the present article we discuss and review the importance and relevance of adopting also a descriptive approach that is grounded in the behavioral sciences (referred to as behavioral business ethics). This approach has the advantages to promote our insights into how people can show both good and bad behavior and why this is the case. Behavioral business ethics therefore represents an important research challenge for organizational researchers to pursue and engage more meaningfully with more prescriptive approaches.

The strength of a remorseful heart: psychological and neural basis of how apology emolliates reactive aggression and promotes forgiveness

Apology from the offender facilitates forgiveness and thus has the power to restore a broken relationship. Here we showed that apology from the offender not only reduces the victim’s propensity to react aggressively but also alters the victim’s implicit attitude and neural responses toward the offender. We adopted an interpersonal competitive game which consisted of two phases. In the first, “passive” phase, participants were punished by high or low pain stimulation chosen by the opponents when losing a trial. During the break, participants received a note from each of the opponents, one apologizing and the other not. The second, “active” phase, involved a change of roles where participants could punish the two opponents after winning. Experiment 1 included an Implicit Association Test (IAT) in between the reception of notes and the second phase. Experiment 2 recorded participants’ brain potentials in the second phase. We found that participants reacted less aggressively toward the apologizing opponent than the non-apologizing opponent in the active phase. Moreover, female, but not male, participants responded faster in the IAT when positive and negative words were associated with the apologizing and the non-apologizing opponents, respectively, suggesting that female participants had enhanced implicit attitude toward the apologizing opponent. Furthermore, the late positive potential (LPP), a component in brain potentials associated with affective/motivational reactions, was larger when viewing the portrait of the apologizing than the non-apologizing opponent when participants subsequently selected low punishment. Additionally, the LPP elicited by the apologizing opponents’ portrait was larger in the female than in the male participants. These findings confirm the apology’s role in reducing reactive aggression and further reveal that this forgiveness process engages, at least in female, an enhancement of the victim’s implicit attitude and a prosocial motivational change toward the offender.

The Unburdening Effects of Forgiveness

Research shows that in the aftermath of conflict, forgiveness improves victims’ well-being and the victim–offender relationship. Building on the research on embodied perception and economy of action, we demonstrate that forgiveness also has implications for victims’ perceptions and behavior in the physical domain. Metaphorically, unforgiveness is a burden that can be lightened by forgiveness; we show that people induced to feel forgiveness perceive hills to be less steep (Study 1) and jump higher in an ostensible fitness test (Study 2) than people who are induced to feel unforgiveness. These findings suggest that forgiveness may lighten the physical burden of unforgiveness, providing evidence that forgiveness can help victims overcome the negative effects of conflict.

Apology isn't good enough: an apology suppresses an approach motivation but not the physiological and psychological anger

Although studies have emphasized the multiple components of anger, little is known about the physiological and psychological mechanisms of the approach motivational component and the negative emotional component of anger. In the present study, participants wrote brief opinions about social problems (e.g., tuition hikes) and received a handwritten, insulting comment about their composition from the experimenter. Half of the participants (apology group) received a simple apologetic sentence at the end of the insulting comment. Half of the participants (no apology group) did not receive one. The physiological responses of the participants were recorded prior to, and after they read the comments. Increases in heart rate and asymmetric frontal brain activity were suppressed only in the apology group. Both groups showed an increase in skin conductance response. Our psychological scales showed that the apology suppressed self reported state anger from an approach-motivational standpoint but not from a negative emotional standpoint. The results suggest that anger is not a unitary process but has multiple components. The apology did provide a different physiological profile but did not dampen down the subjective experience of anger. Thus, providing an apology may not always be effective for alleviating the experience of anger to an insult.