Chris Reinders Folmer

How Important Is an Apology to You?: Forecasting Errors in Evaluating the Value of Apologies

Apologies are commonly used to deal with transgressions in relationships. Results to date, however, indicate that the positive effects of apologies vary widely, and the match between people’s judgments of apologies and the true value of apologies has not been studied. Building on the affective and behavioral forecasting literature, we predicted that people would overestimate how much they value apologies in reality. Across three experimental studies, our results showed that after having been betrayed by another party (or after imagining this to be the case), people (a) rated the value of an apology much more highly when they imagined receiving an apology than when they actually received an apology and (b) displayed greater trusting behavior when they imagined receiving an apology than when they actually received an apology. These results suggest that people are prone to forecasting errors regarding the effectiveness of an apology and that they tend to overvalue the impact of receiving one.

Bad for Me or Bad for Us? Interpersonal Orientations and the Impact of Losses on Unethical Behavior

The present research examines the role of allocations of losses versus gains on the emergence of unethical behavior as a function of people’s social value orientation. The authors demonstrate that (a) proselfs regard unethical behavior to prevent losses as more justified than prosocials (Study 1) and (b) proselfs engage in more unethical behavior to prevent losses than prosocials (Study 2). These differences are explained by prosocials’ greater concern for harm to interdependent others in the domain of losses. A third study further substantiates these findings by revealing that unethical behavior to prevent losses increases among prosocials as harm to others is reduced. In sum, these results reveal that depending on whether people attend only to their self-interest or also consider the outcomes of others, losses either may increase or curtail unethical conduct. Considering social value orientations thus may reconcile conflicting theoretical perspectives on the impact of losses on social decisions.

Cooperation in mixed-motive games: the role of individual differences in selfish and social orientation

In mixed–motive games, people must choose between acting upon selfish interests and concerns for others. Yet, the consistency of peoples behaviour across these various games is still unclear. If the same conflict between self and others is at the core of all mixed–motive situations, three hypotheses can be stated: (1) behaviours in different mixed–motive games should be substantially related; (2) all these games should substantially appeal to dispositional variables that probe in the psychological conflict between self and others; and (3) these dispositional variables should explain the shared variance among various games. These hypotheses were tested among undergraduate students (N = 219) who played seven different single–shot mixed–motive games and one sequential game. Social Value Orientation and the ideological attitudes Social Dominance Orientation and Right–Wing Authoritarianism were included as dispositions. Our findings, however, showed evidence that did not fully substantiate our hypotheses, which calls into question the general idea that all mixed–motive games render the conflict between selfish interests and concern for others salient. In the discussion, we focus on implications for research on mixed–motive situations and elaborate on the role of ideology in this domain. Copyright

Is Trust for Sale? The Effectiveness of Financial Compensation for Repairing Competence- versus Integrity-Based Trust Violations

Despite the popularity of financial compensation as a means for addressing trust violations, the question whether (more) money can indeed buy trust back remains largely unexplored. In the present research, we focus on the role of violation type and compensation size. The results of a scenario study and a laboratory experiment show that financial compensation can effectively promote the restoration of trust for transgressions that indicate a lack of competence. Conversely, for transgressions which signal a lack of integrity, financial compensation is not an effective tool to repair trust. Moreover, our findings indicate that for both violation types, overcompensation has no positive effects on top of the impact of equal compensation. These findings therefore show that when it comes to trust, money cannot buy everything.

More Money, More Trust? Target and Observer Differences in the Effectiveness of Financial Overcompensation to Restore Trust

Recent research revealed that despite its financial costs, overcompensation is not more effective to restore trust in the perpetrator than equal compensation. In a lab experiment (N = 115), we compared the effects of these compensation sizes for both targets of the compensation and non-involved observers. It was revealed that overcompensation did not yield superior outcomes than equal compensation. Specifically, for targets overcompensation resulted in lower levels of trust than equal compensation, while for observers equal compensation and overcompensation resulted in similar levels of trust. This finding suggests that overcompensation is not a cost-effective trust repair strategy, neither for the targets nor for third party observers. Other implications are discussed as well.

Is it Really Not About the Money? Victim Needs Following Personal Injury and Property Loss and Their Relative Restoration Through Monetary Compensation and Apology

Tort law currently debates the value of facilitating apology, particularly in the domain of personal injury litigation, where victims’ immaterial needs are claimed to be neglected by monetary remedies. However, insight on its remedial value is limited, as extant evidence does not yet illuminate 1) which immaterial needs victims experience in tort situations, 2) how prominent these needs are relative to their material needs, 3) how monetary remedies may redress either need, 4) how apologies contribute beyond this, and 5) how this may impact case resolution (i.e., settlement decisions). We present two experimental studies that illuminate these questions by demonstrating that 1) tort victims experience several distinctive immaterial needs (for interpersonal treatment, responsibility taking, punishment, and closure); 2) these needs are relatively less prominent than victims’ material needs, and no more prominent in personal injury cases than following exclusively pecuniary loss; 3) greater monetary compensation enhances the satisfaction of both victims’ material and immaterial needs; 4) apologies further enhance their satisfaction beyond monetary compensation; 5) however, apology had little impact on settlement, which remained mostly contingent on monetary compensation. No indications were found that apologies are especially effective in personal injury cases (relative to exclusively pecuniary loss). Implications are provided for the role of apology in tort law.

Coping with noise in social dilemmas: Group representatives fare worse than individuals because they lack trust in others’ benign intentions:

Research on interindividual–intergroup discontinuity has illuminated distinct patterns of cognition, motivation, and behavior in interindividual versus intergroup contexts. However, it has examined these processes in laboratory environments with perfect transparency, whereas real-life interactions are often characterized by noise (i.e., misperceptions and unintended errors). This research compared interindividual and intergroup interactions in the presence or absence of noise. In a laboratory experiment, participants played 35 rounds of a dyadic give-some dilemma, in which they acted as individuals or group representatives. Noise was manipulated, such that players’ intentions either were perfectly translated into behavior or could deviate from their intentions in certain rounds (resulting in less cooperative behavior). Noise was more detrimental to cooperation in intergroup contexts than in interindividual contexts, because (a) participants who formed benign impressions of the other player coped better with noise, and (b) participants were less likely to form such benign impressions in intergroup than interindividual interactions.

The Underlying Motives of Different Mixed-motive Games

Haesevoets, Reinders Folmer, and Van Hiel (2015) have shown limited consistency of peoples behaviour across various mixed–motive games. According to these authors, the modest relationships among these games call into question the general idea that all mixed–motive games render the conflict between selfish interests and concern for others equally salient. Thielmann, Böhm, and Hilbig (2015), however, argued that these findings can be explained in terms of the motivational differences that underlie the games. In this article, we demonstrate that Thielmann et al.s descriptive model of the different motives underlying selfish and prosocial choices cannot be straightforwardly applied to the empirical data at hand. Analogous to our previous article, we again stress the need for further empirical research investigating the underlying motivational basis of each mixed–motive game. Copyright