It's better to pay the price when you apologize and show good faith

, Dec. 23 (Xinhua) -- How can governments, schools or enterprises conduct crisis public relations more effectively? By analyzing people's brain activity, Japanese researchers have found that these institutions are better able to pay a price if they want to apologize, making it easier to pass on good faith to the recipient.
in a scenario simulation study, researchers from Kobe University, Nagoya University and other institutions in Japan worked on several experimental scenarios for institutional apologies. Twenty-five college students participated in the experiment as an apologetic party, and the researchers described scenes in which institutions were responsible, such as schools that knew there was campus bullying but failed to respond, and apartments sold by a company that were not earthquake-resistant enough to accept different ways of apologizing in each scenario.
, the team used a functional magnetic resonance imaging device to look at the brains of college students who received apologies. It turned out that when the agency apologized without apologizing, it was more likely to pay a price, such as compensating for losses or seriously investigating the cause of the accident, and that the left and right temporal junctions of college students who received apologies were more pronounced in the left and right temporal areas and the wedge front lobe areas. Previous studies have found that these brain regions become active when perceived.
paper has been published online in the journal Social Neuroscience. The researchers explain that institutions and individuals are not able to express good faith visually, which weakens the effectiveness of apologies, and the new study shows that institutions' apologies come at a cost to make the other person feel sincere.