Apology Or Financial Compensation?

As a Chinese saying goes,"People cannot survive without trust,business cannot flourish without trust,and a country will decline without trust".Trust plays an important role in our social interaction.Trust violation will bring many negative consequences.Therefore,it is necessary to repair damaged trust.In recent years,many scholars both domestic and overseas have studied trust repair and put forward a variety of trust repair strategies,among which apology and financial compensation are often used.However,these strategies seldom consider the power factor of individuals in trust repair,but we live in a complex social environment,and the difference of power is ubiquitous in our work and life.Therefore,this study will set high and low power roles in the investment game take college students as the subjects,to test the effectiveness of apology and financial compensation strategies for trust repair of different power individuals,and explore the differences in the repair effect of different strategies for different power individuals.This study consisted of two experiments,both of which adopted a mixed design.The independent variables were composed of between-subjects factor: power(high and low)and within-subjects factor:repair strategy(apology,financial compensation,apology and financial compensation,control group).The dependent variables were initial trust level and post-repair trust level.By setting up two kinds of power roles in the investment game,and the initial trust level of different power individuals was measured.Then,the trust violation event was set in the game.After the violation event happened,the strategy of apology,financial compensation and apology plus financial compensation was used for repairing the trust of high and low power individuals respectively,and their trust level after repair was measured.The results of Experiment 1 show that,for high power victims,using financial compensation strategy after repair of the investment amount was higher than the use of apology strategies.For low power victims,compared with the control group,the amount of investment after repair using apology strategy was higher than that using the financial compensation strategy.In experiment 2,the intensity of financial compensation was increased to the level of medium excess financial compensation,and the research hypothesis was repeatedly verified.The results show that for both high-power victims and low-power victims,the investment amount after using the medium excess financial compensation strategy was higher than that after using the apology strategy.The following conclusions were obtained through two experiments:(1)For the individuals in the high-power group,the repair effect of financial compensation strategy was better than that of apology strategy,whether it was just compensation or medium excess financial compensation.(2)For the individuals in the low power group,when the intensity of financial compensation was just compensation,the repair effect of apology strategy was better than that of financial compensation strategy;When the financial compensation was increased to the level of medium excess financial compensation,the repair effect of the apology strategy was no longer better than that of the financial compensation strategy.On the contrary,the repair effect of the financial compensation strategy was better than that of the apology strategy.