The impact of apologies, accounts, and remorse on attributions of responsibility: Implications for the legal system

When a transgression occurs, an offender can offer an account to explain her behavior. The account may minimize the offender's responsibility for the transgression and demonstrates that the offender's behavior does not reflect her general personality. Victims and perceivers judge the offender and attribute responsibility based on the given account. According to the Integrated Attribution of Responsibility Model (AOR Model; Gailey & Lee, 2005), responsibility attributions are influenced by a variety of factors, some of which are inherently manipulated by providing an account. The current research examined the effects of accounts on judgments of the offender. Experiment 1 tested an excuse, justification, denial, and no account, whereas Experiment 2 tested an apology account. Participants in Experiment 1 were mock jurors and watched a mock trial video in which the defendant's account regarding his neighbor's death was manipulated. The study also manipulated the defendant's remorse display (i.e., remorseful, remorseless) to examine the interactions between accounts and remorse. Participants viewed the defendant in the excuse condition most favorably, but they acquitted the defendant in the denial condition most often and recommended the most lenient punishment in the justification condition. However, providing no account consistently produced the most negative outcomes. Defendants offering these accounts benefited from remorseless displays because the remorseful defendant was found guilty more frequently. Experiment 2 staged a situation in which the research assistant insulted the participants to assess responses from actual rather than hypothetical victims. This study manipulated the coerciveness of the apology that the research assistant provided the participant. The apology conditions were: voluntary, coerced with no consequences, coerced with threat of negative consequences, and no apology. Victims judged the offender more positively and punished him less when he provided an apology rather than no apology. Victims did not distinguish between the different apology types on most measures, suggesting that coercive apologies can produce the same positive effects of voluntary apologies. Additionally, both studies found support for certain factors in the AOR Model; specifically, actor characteristics (i.e., gender, positive/negative traits, behavioral consistency), respondent characteristics (i.e., gender, age), causality, and intentionality each predict attributions of responsibility.