Pay the price when apologizing

How can government, school or enterprise carry out crisis public relations more effectively? By analyzing people's brain activity, Japanese researchers found that if these institutions want to apologize, they'd better pay a price, so that it's easier to pass on sincerity to the recipient In a scenario study, a team of researchers from Kobe University, Nagoya University and other institutions constructed several experimental scenarios of institutional apology Twenty five college students participated in the experiment as the apologists The researchers described to them some scenes where some institutions had responsibilities, such as the school knew that there was campus bullying but was not able to cope with it, the anti-seismic strength of apartments sold by a company was not up to standard, etc in each scene, they were divided into groups to accept different ways of apologies The team then used fMRI equipment to look at the brains of college students who received apologies The results showed that compared with no apology or simple apology, when the organization expressed willingness to pay a certain price at the same time of apology, such as compensation for the loss or serious investigation of the cause of the accident, the activities of the right and left temporal parietal junction area and the anterior cuneiform lobe area of the brain of the college students receiving the apology were more obvious Previous studies have found that these brain regions become active when perceiving sincerity Relevant papers have been published in the online edition of social neuroscience The researchers explained that different institutions and individuals are hard to express sincerity intuitively, which weakens the effect of apology, and the new study shows that the apology of institutions can make the other party feel sincerity at a certain price (BIOON Com)