To Blame Or To Apologize? Resolving A Conflict Requires Negotiating Over A Shared Reality

Authors:

Abstract: Apologies are key to conflict resolution, but we find that blaming is common even in close relationships; and people intuit blaming will elicit apologies. Prior literature suggests divergent hypotheses on how blaming affects conflict dynamics: Reciprocity predicts return blaming (thus, escalation), whereas a desire to comply with requests predicts apologizing (thus, de-escalation). We reconcile the two accounts by proposing whether blaming elicits apologizing or return blaming depends on what blaming implies about the relative blame distribution, i.e., how much blame each person deserves. Across four studies, we find that people are motivated to achieve a shared understanding about the division of relative blame through conversation. Listeners infer that blamers are assigning them all the blame. When listeners disagree (vs. agree) with this, they are motivated to “correct” the blamer’s beliefs by blaming back. We find evidence of moderators that cannot be explained by reciprocity. Implications for conflict spirals are discussed.

Track: COMM

Keywords: apology, reconciliation, conflict spirals, shared reality, social cognition