The Effect Of Apology On Implicit Forgiveness In Stranger Situations

Forgiveness refers to the process in which the victim,after being wronged,gives up the negative emotions,judgments and behaviors towards the offender and replaces them with positive emotions,judgments and behaviors.Apology is the behavior of the offender seeking forgiveness from the victim in order to solve the problem.With the continuous progress of the times,the rapid development of science,technology and network,more and more strangers communicate with each other.In interpersonal communication,people will inevitably bring a variety of contradictions.When an offense or injury occurs,some people choose to apologize directly in person,while others express their apologies in writing due to their introversion or face-saver.Whichever way you choose,it is vital that apologize is a good way to seek the forgiveness from victim.As a way to alleviate negative emotions,apologizing can not only resolve problems,but also the effectively apologizing can improve the level of the forgiveness.Therefore,the purpose of this paper is to research on the effect of different ways of apologizing on forgiveness between the strangers.In the past,most of the research on forgiveness used questionnaire survey,while the research mostly focused on explicit forgiveness.Based on the past studies,this paper will make a deep study on implicit forgiveness.In experiment 1,a single factor experiment design was adopted.After offending the subject through the dictator task paradigm,the offender did not apologize to the subject,and the subject's implicit forgiveness level did not change.In experiment 2,a two-factor mixed experiment design was adopted: 2 apology methods(written apology vs face to face apology)×2 test timing(pretest vs posttest),and the dependent variable was the response time of implicit association test.Among them,the second experiment further refined the way of apology into two ways: written apology and face-to-face apology,which proved that apology has an effect on implicit forgiveness.In experiment 3,2 apology methods(face to face apology vs written apology)×2 self-esteem(high self-esteem vs low self-esteem)were used to design the relationship between the three variables.The two factors were taken as the independent variable and the dependent variable as the level of forgiveness.Through the research we can find:1.College students exist obviously implicit forgiveness tendency,and there is no difference between men and women;2.The offender and the victim are strangers,they make some conflicts.If the offender not to apologize to the victim,the victim can't forgive the offender and the implicit forgiveness does not change significantly;3.The offender and the victim are strangers,they make some conflicts.Whether the offender chooses to apologize in face-to-face or in writing,the victim can forgive the offender and the level of the implicit forgiveness will change significantly.In addition,the face-to-face apology can significantly improve.4.In the case of strangers,the influence of different apology methods on forgiveness was adjusted by self-esteem.