An affirmed self and a better apology: The effect of self-affirmation on transgressors' responses to victims

doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2014.04.013

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

Volume 54, September 2014, Pages 89-96

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2014.04.013 Get rights and content

Highlights

•
Tested whether self-affirmation could promote more effective apologies.
•
Affirmed transgressors included more apology elements and fewer defensive strategies.
•
Affirmed transgressors were thus more likely to respond in ways that boost forgiveness.
•
First empirical research to identify a method for promoting more effective apologies.
•
Successful application of self-affirmation theory to interpersonal conflict resolution.

Abstract

Comprehensive apologies are powerful tools that transgressors can use to promote reconciliation with the people they have hurt. However, because many apology elements require transgressors to admit fault, express shameful emotions and promise change, transgressors often avoid these threatening elements and instead choose to use more perfunctory apologies or even defensive strategies, such as justifications or attempts to blame the person they hurt. In two studies, I aimed to increase apology comprehensiveness and reduce defensiveness using self-affirmation. I predicted that self-affirmation would help transgressors maintain their self-integrity, consequently allowing them to offer more comprehensive apologies and bypass defensive strategies. Participants received a values affirmation, recalled an unresolved conflict, and indicated what they would say to the person they had hurt. As predicted, affirmed participants offered more comprehensive apologies and used fewer defensive strategies than control participants. These studies thus identify a simple method for promoting responses that facilitate conflict resolution and demonstrate the successful application of self-affirmation to the domain of interpersonal conflict.

Introduction

One of the unfortunate certainties of life is that we sometimes hurt people we care about. Luckily, these conflict events do not have to be detrimental to our relationships. Our relationship partners can forgive us for our harmful actions, and this forgiveness can increase their feelings of closeness (McCullough et al., 1998) and their willingness to cooperate and prioritize the needs of the relationship (Karremans & Van Lange, 2004). Moreover, actively discussing and working to resolve relationship problems are associated with positive feelings between partners, as well as both short- and long-term benefits to the relationship (Overall, Sibley, & Travaglia, 2010). Thus, when managed well, conflicts can be functional and contribute to positive relationship outcomes (Gottman and Krokoff, 1989, Markman et al., 1988).

When managed poorly, however, conflicts can be detrimental to relationship satisfaction, causing lasting resentment and even relationship dissolution (Carrere and Gottman, 1999, Cramer, 2000). These negative effects are not limited to romantic partnerships. Ongoing conflicts can harm other types of relationships (e.g., friendships: Raffaelli, 1997; family: Overall et al., 2010) and have consequences that extend beyond relationship outcomes. For example, unresolved conflict with a colleague in the workplace is associated with reduced organizational commitment, increased intentions to quit, and poor task performance (De Dreu and Weingart, 2003, Morrison, 2008). The ability to successfully manage and resolve interpersonal conflict thus has diverse implications for the discordant relationship, its individual members, and others in the broader social or work network.

Section snippets

Comprehensive apologies as tools for conflict resolution

In attempting to manage a conflict, the offending person (transgressor) can perform actions that influence whether the offended person (victim) will respond with forgiveness or continued anger and resentment. Research on conflict management suggests that an apology is one of the most powerful tools transgressors can use to promote reconciliation with the victim (Fehr, Gelfand, & Nag, 2010). Apologies increase victim forgiveness, reduce anger and aggression toward the transgressor, and validate

Barriers to offering comprehensive apologies

If comprehensive apologies are so effective at promoting reconciliation with the victim, why don't transgressors use them in every conflict situation? I propose that transgressors may avoid offering comprehensive apologies because it can be threatening to do so. People are highly motivated to maintain their sense of self-worth and integrity (Sherman & Cohen, 2006), but the act of harming another person can threaten one's identity as a good and appropriate person (Aronson, 1999, Goffman, 1971,

Self-affirmation as a means of promoting more effective apologies

Self-affirmation theory (Steele, 1988) posits that people can protect their self-integrity from threats by reflecting on other important values and sources of self-worth. Reflecting on core values allows people to adopt a more expansive view of the self, weakening the implications of a threat for their self-integrity. With their self-integrity intact, they can bypass defensive behaviors aimed at protecting the self from the threat (Cohen and Sherman, 2014, Sherman and Cohen, 2006). As a result,

Study 1

In Study 1, I conducted an initial test of my hypothesis by randomly assigning adult participants to either a traditional self-affirmation condition or a control condition and then having them write what they would say to a person they had hurt. I predicted that participants who had the opportunity to affirm core values would write responses that included more apology elements and fewer defensive strategies.

Study 2

In Study 2, I aimed to replicate and develop a deeper understanding of the effects observed in Study 1. First, I sought to rule out mood as an alternate cause of the effect of self-affirmation on transgressors' responses. Although most evidence suggests that mood cannot explain the effects of self-affirmation (e.g., Cohen et al., 2000, Sherman et al., 2000, Shrira and Martin, 2005), some studies have shown a positive effect of self-affirmation on mood (e.g., Koole, Smeets, van Knippenberg, &

General discussion

Conflict is an inevitable aspect of social interactions. But if managed well, hurtful events can be transformed into constructive experiences that might even improve the relationship between the transgressor and the victim. An impressive amount of scholarship has demonstrated the benefits of forgiveness and reconciliation (e.g., Karremans and Van Lange, 2004, Witvliet et al., 2001) and has identified processes—such as comprehensive apologies—that promote reconciliation (Fehr et al., 2010). The

References (64)

C.M. Steele
The psychology of self-affirmation: Sustaining the integrity of the self
J.C. Anderson et al.
Influence of apologies and trait hostility on recovery from anger
Journal of Behavioral Medicine
(2006)
E. Aronson
Dissonance, hypocrisy, and the self-concept
Readings about the social animal
(1999)
M. Burhmester et al.
Amazon's Mechanical Turk: A new source of inexpensive, yet high quality, data?
Perspectives on Psychological Science
(2011)
S. Carrere et al.
Predicting divorce among newlyweds from the first three minutes of a marital conflict discussion
Family Process
(1999)
S. Cehajic-Clancy et al.
Affirmation, acknowledgment of ingroup responsibility, group-based guilt, and support for reparative measures
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
(2011)
G.L. Cohen et al.
When beliefs yield to evidence: Reducing biased evaluation by affirming the self
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
(2000)
G.L. Cohen et al.
Recursive processes in self-affirmation: Intervening to close the minority achievement gap
Science
(2009)
G.L. Cohen et al.
The psychology of change: Self-affirmation and social psychological intervention
Annual Review of Psychology
(2014)
G.L. Cohen et al.
Bridging the partisan divide: Self-affirmation reduces ideological closed-mindedness and inflexibility in negotiation
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
(2007)

D. Cramer

Relationship satisfaction and conflict style in romantic relationships

The Journal of Psychology

(2000)

C.R. Critcher et al.

When self-affirmations reduce defensiveness: Timing is key

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

(2010)

J. Crocker et al.

Why does writing about important values reduce defensiveness? Self-affirmation and the role of positive, other directed feelings

Psychological Science

(2008)

B.W. Darby et al.

Children's reactions to apologies

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

(1982)

C.K.W. De Dreu et al.

Task versus relationship conflict, team performance, and team member satisfaction: A meta-analysis

Journal of Applied Psychology

(2003)

J.A. Eaton

Repentance as validation: Toward an understanding of the mechanisms behind repentance and forgiveness

Dissertation Abstracts, Section B: The Sciences and Engineering

(2006)

J.J. Exline et al.

Is apology worth the risk? Predictors, outcomes, and ways to avoid regret

Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology

(2007)

R. Fehr et al.

The road to forgiveness: A meta-analytic synthesis of its situational and dispositional correlates

Psychological Bulletin

(2010)

F.D. Fincham et al.

Longitudinal relations between forgiveness and conflict resolution in marriage

Journal of Family Psychology

(2007)

E. Goffman

Relations in public

(1971)

J.M. Gottman et al.

Marital interaction and satisfaction: A longitudinal view

Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology

(1989)

J. Gottman et al.

The seven principles for making marriage work: A practical guide from the country's foremost relationship expert

(1999)

J.H. Hall et al.

The temporal course of self-forgiveness

Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology

(2008)

J. Holmes

Apologies in New Zealand English

Language in Society

(1990)

R. Itoi et al.

A cross-cultural study of preference of accounts: Relationship closeness, harm severity, and motives of account making

Journal of Applied Social Psychology

(1996)

J.C. Karremans et al.

Back to caring after being hurt: The role of forgiveness

European Journal of Social Psychology

(2004)

J. Kirchhoff et al.

Apologies: Words of magic? The role of verbal components, anger reduction, and offense severity

Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology

(2012)

S.L. Koole et al.

The cessation of rumination through self-affirmation

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

(1999)

K.A. Lawler et al.

The unique effects of forgiveness on health: An exploration of pathways

Journal of Behavioral Medicine

(2005)

A. Lazare

On apology

(2004)

L. Legault et al.

Preserving integrity in the face of performance threat: Self-affirmation enhances neurophysiological responsiveness to task errors

Psychological Science

(2012)

H.J. Markman et al.

The prevention of marital distress: A longitudinal investigation

Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology

(1988)

Cited by (72)

Concrete or abstract: How chatbot response styles influence customer satisfaction
2023, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
Lack of empathy is the key reason why chatbots cannot effectively handle service problems. Empathy consists of affective and cognitive components. Existing studies primarily emphasize empathic concern—the affective component of empathy—to improve the problem-solving performance of chatbots but neglect the cognitive component of empathy, or empathic accuracy. Focusing on empathy’s cognitive component, three experiments were conducted to explore how problem response styles of chatbots (concrete vs. abstract) influence customer satisfaction based on social response theory. When chatbots respond to service problems, their concrete responses can improve customer satisfaction than abstract responses. Empathic accuracy mediates the relationship between chatbot response styles and customer satisfaction. When responses are abstract, increasing chatbots’ cuteness can alleviate the negative effect of lack of empathic accuracy on customer satisfaction. These findings provide a deeper understanding of chatbots’ empathy and help enterprises improve the response performance of chatbots to deal with service problems.
How do consumers react to chatbots' humorous emojis in service failures
2023, Technology in Society
Prior research has shown that humor can positively impact service recovery in face-to-face interactions. However, the efficacy of using humor in virtual environments for chatbots to address service failures remains unclear. Through three experiments in different populations, this paper found that using humorous emojis by chatbots can help increase consumers' willingness to continue using chatbots after service failures (i.e., reuse intention) and the underlying mechanism; that is, the level of consumers perceiving the degree of the chatbot's intelligence (i.e., perceived intelligence) partially mediates the relationship between humorous emojis use and consumers' reuse intention. Further, how people form impressions about others based on limited information (i.e., implicit personality) significantly moderates the influence path from humorous emojis use to perceived intelligence, and perceived intelligence is more likely to mediate for people who see challenging situations as opportunities (i.e., incremental theorists). In conclusion, this paper provides empirical evidence supporting the potential benefits of using humorous emojis in chatbot service recovery, and offers guidance to online retailers to leverage digital technology for effective consumer engagement.
Would you help me again? The role of moral identity, helping motivation and quality of gratitude expressions in future helping intentions
2022, Personality and Individual Differences
Citation Excerpt :
Although we do not dispute this finding, we understand that the quality of what is communicated also matters. For instance, research on reconciliation showed that, more than apologizing, offenders should provide high-quality apologies to increase their chances of being forgiven by better communicating remorse, a desire to amend the situation and a promise of change (Ludwig et al., 2022; Schumann, 2014). We believe that the same idea of quality may apply to expressions of gratitude.
Moral identity has been considered an important predictor of prosocial behavior. This article extends prior research by investigating how and when moral identity predicts helping behavior. Specifically, we examine the mediating effect of episodic autonomous motivation on the relationship between moral identity and future helping intentions. We also test the moderating effect of an important contextual factor in helping episodes: the quality of the gratitude expression received by helpers. In two studies using autobiographical recall tasks with different samples (Study 1: N = 134, college students; Study 2: N = 192, adult workers), we found convergent evidence that helpers with high moral identity experience higher autonomous motivation in a helping episode, which in turn increases their willingness to help the same beneficiary in the future. We further found support for the interactive effects between autonomous motivation and gratitude quality on future helping intentions. High-quality gratitude expressions are particularly important in predicting subsequent helping for helpers with low episodic autonomous motivation. In this case, high-quality gratitude expressions can compensate for the lack of intrinsic motivation in a helping episode and increase future help provision.
The moderating role of transgressors' apology on the association between the Dark Triad and victims' post-transgression responses
2022, Personality and Individual Differences
The goal of this research was to examine the association between victims' Dark Triad personality and their social motivation to not forgive (unforgiveness) or forgive transgressors after an interpersonal conflict. The moderating role of transgressors' apology as well as the mediational role of victims' indignation to explain the moderated relation was also tested. Unforgiving responses (operationalized as revenge and avoidance) were predicted to be stronger, and forgiving responses, weaker, among those exhibiting characteristics consistent with the Dark Triad. We also predicted a counterintuitive, but theoretically consistent, stronger positive relation between the Dark Triad and unforgiving responses when victims received an apology. In addition, we predicted that indignation would explain this moderated relation. Two studies using an adult community and an undergraduate sample, respectively, confirmed the moderation hypothesis (Studies 1 and 2) but not the mediated moderation hypothesis (Study 2).
Humble and apologetic? Predicting apology quality with intellectual and general humility
2022, Personality and Individual Differences
Citation Excerpt :
However, transgressors who feel little concern for the victim might feel less motivated to engage in this other-oriented behavior. Transgressors might also be reluctant to offer a high-quality apology because they believe that doing so will associate them with wrongful behavior—an association that threatens their self-image as a moral person who deserves positive social relationships (Schumann, 2014, 2018). Indeed, transgressors are often reluctant to apologize because they overestimate how humiliating and stressful it will feel (Leunissen et al., 2014).
Apologies are powerful predictors of reconciliation, but transgressors often fail to offer optimal, high-quality apologies that are comprehensive and non-defensive. We tested whether intellectual humility and general humility predict the use of high-quality apologies versus taking no action to resolve a conflict, and the processes that mediate these associations using online vignette experiments. In Study 1 (N = 397), transgressors with greater intellectual humility offered higher-quality apologies and were less likely to take no action following a relational offense. However, these associations did not remain significant when controlling for general humility. In Study 2 (N = 394), intellectual humility uniquely predicted greater apology comprehensiveness and less inaction following an intellect-based offense, demonstrating its context-specific associations with apology behavior. By contrast, general humility was a robust predictor of higher-quality apologies and less inaction across offense contexts. Consistent with recent theorizing on psychological barriers to apologizing, both studies also found support for the mediating roles of empathic effort and self-protection.
Crisis communication: The mediating role of cognitive and affective empathy in the relationship between crisis type and crisis response strategy on post-crisis reputation and forgiveness
2022, Public Relations Review
Citation Excerpt :
This calls for crafting press releases that could cultivate empathy among the publics and showing that the organization is doing all it can to prevent the recurrence of the crisis. Another way of inducing empathetic feelings is by actively listening to the victims, asking them to explain their perspectives, and consciously trying to share the victims’ affective states (Eyal, Steffel, & Epley, 2018; Schumann, 2014). Moreover, crisis spokespeople should examine the nature of the crisis before offering a response.
This study seeks to contribute to the growing body of research in crisis communication by exploring how two types of empathy; cognitive empathy and affective empathy, affect organizational reputation and publics’ forgiveness for an organization that is in a crisis. An online three (crisis type: victim vs. accidental vs. preventable) × two (response strategy: rebuilding vs. denial) between-subjects experiment was conducted with 648 participants (N = 648) recruited through Amazon’s research tool MTurk. The results of the study reveal that crisis type affects both cognitive and affective empathy and people are more likely to feel empathetic toward an organization that uses rebuilding strategies than an organization that denies the existence of a crisis. Theoretical and practical implications of empathy on corporate reputation and forgiveness are discussed.

View all citing articles on Scopus

^☆: This article was prepared with the support of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship (award # 756-2011-0397) awarded to Karina Schumann.

View full text

An affirmed self and a better apology: The effect of self-affirmation on transgressors' responses to victims☆

Highlights

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

Comprehensive apologies as tools for conflict resolution

Barriers to offering comprehensive apologies

Self-affirmation as a means of promoting more effective apologies

Study 1

Study 2

General discussion

Influence of apologies and trait hostility on recovery from anger

Journal of Behavioral Medicine

Dissonance, hypocrisy, and the self-concept

Readings about the social animal

Amazon's Mechanical Turk: A new source of inexpensive, yet high quality, data?

Perspectives on Psychological Science

Predicting divorce among newlyweds from the first three minutes of a marital conflict discussion

Family Process

Affirmation, acknowledgment of ingroup responsibility, group-based guilt, and support for reparative measures

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

When beliefs yield to evidence: Reducing biased evaluation by affirming the self

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

Recursive processes in self-affirmation: Intervening to close the minority achievement gap

Science

The psychology of change: Self-affirmation and social psychological intervention

Annual Review of Psychology

Bridging the partisan divide: Self-affirmation reduces ideological closed-mindedness and inflexibility in negotiation

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Relationship satisfaction and conflict style in romantic relationships

The Journal of Psychology

When self-affirmations reduce defensiveness: Timing is key

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

Why does writing about important values reduce defensiveness? Self-affirmation and the role of positive, other directed feelings

Psychological Science

Children's reactions to apologies

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Task versus relationship conflict, team performance, and team member satisfaction: A meta-analysis

Journal of Applied Psychology

Repentance as validation: Toward an understanding of the mechanisms behind repentance and forgiveness

Dissertation Abstracts, Section B: The Sciences and Engineering

Is apology worth the risk? Predictors, outcomes, and ways to avoid regret

Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology

The road to forgiveness: A meta-analytic synthesis of its situational and dispositional correlates

Psychological Bulletin

Longitudinal relations between forgiveness and conflict resolution in marriage

Journal of Family Psychology

Relations in public

Marital interaction and satisfaction: A longitudinal view

Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology

The seven principles for making marriage work: A practical guide from the country's foremost relationship expert

The temporal course of self-forgiveness

Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology

Apologies in New Zealand English

Language in Society

A cross-cultural study of preference of accounts: Relationship closeness, harm severity, and motives of account making

Journal of Applied Social Psychology

Back to caring after being hurt: The role of forgiveness

European Journal of Social Psychology

Apologies: Words of magic? The role of verbal components, anger reduction, and offense severity

Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology

The cessation of rumination through self-affirmation

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

The unique effects of forgiveness on health: An exploration of pathways

Journal of Behavioral Medicine

On apology

Preserving integrity in the face of performance threat: Self-affirmation enhances neurophysiological responsiveness to task errors

Psychological Science

The prevention of marital distress: A longitudinal investigation

Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology