Respectful Apologies

BACKGROUND

Seeking to provide empirical evidence to international non-profit organizations on the best way to issue an apology, and why they should care about giving a good apology.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

International development agencies can cause harm to the populations that they are trying to serve, and for that reason, we started our problem as

“How can organizations issue apologies for caused harm in a way that allows the population being served to feel the most respected?”

What considers as a “good” apology?

A lot of the research we reviewed highlighted their own special frameworks but there was a lot of overlap between scholars. In particular, this list of seven things below was what literature consistently outlined as components of a good apology. The overall takeaway from this list is that apologies need to acknowledge and take responsibility for a wrong-doing, explain why it happened, offer reparations, and quite literally say “I’m sorry”.

RESEARCH QUESTION

For our study, we chose to focus on the efficacy of reparations as there is not much research on the actual effects of including reparations in apologies. It is easy to issue a general statement, but we need more evidence to push organizations to recognize the importance of including reparations.

Given the findings from our literature review, our research question is,

“How can the offer of reparations help organizations in the International Development issue more effective apologies?”

For all treatments we started by asking participants general demographic questions, then we presented them with our vignette outlining harm. After that participants were asked attention check questions and participants were then presented with an apology issued for the harm outlined in a vignette.

In all conditions, the base apology issued contained all of the elements of a ‘good’ apology that were identified in our literature review. The only difference between the conditions was the absence or presence of an offer of reparations in the apology and the vagueness of this offer, which varied based on the condition. After the apologies, we asked participants to answer a series of Likert scale questions relating to our measures.

For the vignette, while doing their work, the organization had caused an outbreak of cholera when waste from the organization’s headquarters contaminated the local water supply. Participants were told that 50 people in the community were killed by the outbreak, including a cousin of theirs.

We based the scenario on a real event that occurred in Haiti in 2010 when UN peacekeepers caused an outbreak of cholera that devastated the community they were attempting to aid. We found that this occurrence encapsulated a common type of offense that occurs in International development that we called, “serious but unintended harm”. When harm is caused in International development, the organizations involved often intend to help a community, but harm occurred by “accident” or by “mistake”. 

By creating a vignette focusing on a similar kind of harm, we could encourage organizations to consider the importance of apologies in these cases when blame isn’t entirely clear and harm isn’t caused intentionally, but the consequences are still real and important to the communities being affected.

CONTROL & TREATMENT GROUPS

For our study, we split participants randomly into 3 treatment groups — the control condition, the vague offer of reparations condition, and the concrete offer of reparations condition.

As stated previously, after reading the vignette, participants were shown an apology issued by the CEO which contained a different offer of reparations depending on the condition.

SURVEY MEASURES

We came up with 5 outcomes to test. For each measure, we presented participants with statements and then a 7-point Likert scale asking how much they agreed with the statement.

• Perceived goodness of the apology statement

• Perceived “respectedness” of participants’ dignity

• Perceived believability of the apology statement

• Power restoration

• Willingness to welcome the NGO back to their community

HYPOTHESES

The main hypotheses for our study are:

• The inclusion of an offer of reparation will have a positive effect on all measures in our study in comparison to the control group (no offer of reparation).

• The concrete offer of reparations will have an even greater positive effect than the vague offer.

FUTURE RESEARCH

For the next steps, we recommend more research be conducted to really start understanding the relationship between mistakes in international development and apologies.

• Conducting field studies with actual apologies

  • We think field studies with actual apologies would be interesting - how does actually following through on an apology affect feelings of dignity and respect?

• Conducting more experiments 

  • We also think that lab or online experiments could be helpful in figuring out what ideal reparations look like for different scenarios, how timing can impact feelings of respect, and how people would respond to reparations for offenses that don’t really fall into our serious but unintended harm

REFLECTION

“Apologies aren't meant to change the past, they are meant to change the future.”

— Kevin Hancock

As this quote says, apologies aren't meant to change the past, they are meant to change the future.

Even though our study returned null results, we feel strongly about the topic of apologies and we hope that our work can contribute to the research of apologies and their importance in International Development and that this research might help to create a better future. 

We believe that organizations should make an effort to take responsibility for wrongdoing when it occurs and take steps to make reparations to the communities that they’ve wronged and to respect their dignity.  

If apologies are not enough to make people feel truly respected, which our results indicate, then organizations should try and take further steps to engage with the community they’ve harmed, and maybe even consider taking similar steps from the start, which may be able to prevent some harms from occurring in the first place.

REFERENCE & RESOURCE

Dignity Project  — https://dignityproject.net/

Published report — https://dignityproject.net/our-research/respectful-apologies/

Unsplash stock image — Photo by Flavia Carpio on Unsplash