Neural Correlates of Public Apology Effectiveness.

Hoh Kim,Jaeseung Jeong,Kyongsik Yun,Jerald D Kralik,Yong-An Chung

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2019.00229

Abstract

Apologizing is an effective interpersonal conflict resolution strategy, but whether, and if so how, organizations should issue public apologies after crises remains less clear. To assuage the fear of possible crisis reoccurrence, public apologies may be effective when they provide a comprehensive account of what happened and clarify actions taken by the company to address the problems. If this is so, public apologies may be most effective when the crisis source resides within the organization itself, suggesting that the company has control over it. In the current study, we first tested this hypothesis by presenting participants with multiple crisis scenarios (e.g., ignition failures in a new car model) followed by one of two written apologies: one stating that the crisis source was internal to and controllable by the organization, and the other external and uncontrollable. The internal-controllable (IC) public apology proved most effective. We then examined the neural basis of this public apology assessment and found that the frontal polar cortex appears to mediate the assessment of organizational control, and the angular gyrus uses the information for the apology assessment. Examination of complex social interactions, such as the public’s reaction to corporate crises, helps to elucidate high-level brain function.

Highlights

With repeated social interaction, conflict is inevitable, and one of the oldest known forms of conflict resolution is for the harmdoer to apologize (Goffman, 1971; Benoit, 1995; Lazare, 2004)
Complicating matters, is the potential legal and economic ramifications of declaring responsibility or otherwise upsetting the public even further. This belief has led companies into issuing vague and sometimes misleading public statements, such as in the recent case of United Airlines forcefully removing a customer from the plane, which was recorded by passengers and Neural Correlates of Public Apologies posted online
We examined the neural correlates of the public apology assessments, focusing on identifying the brain regions underlying crisis control assessment and the use of this information to assess the public apology

Summary

Introduction

Conflict is inevitable, and one of the oldest known forms of conflict resolution is for the harmdoer to apologize (Goffman, 1971; Benoit, 1995; Lazare, 2004). A great deal of evidence has shown that interpersonal apologies can be effective (Tomlinson et al, 2004; Zechmeister et al, 2004; Frantz and Bennigson, 2005; Anderson et al, 2006; Tucker et al, 2006; Boothman et al, 2009), with increasingly more complex social interactions the results are less clear. Complicating matters, is the potential legal and economic ramifications of declaring responsibility or otherwise upsetting the public even further. This belief has led companies into issuing vague and sometimes misleading public statements, such as in the recent case of United Airlines forcefully removing a customer from the plane, which was recorded by passengers and Neural Correlates of Public Apologies posted online. The company was forced to issue a series of progressively more forthright responses, but the damage had been done (Creswell and Maheshwari, 2017; Grynbaum, 2017; McCann, 2017)

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Results

Conclusion