When social accounts promote acceptance of unfair ultimatum offers: The role of the victim’s stress responses to uncertainty and power position
Highlights
► We examine when denying responsibility and apologizing make unfair ultimatum offers accepted. ► We tested our ideas in two ultimatum bargaining experiments. ► Denying promoted acceptance when recipients responded to uncertainty with low stress. Apologizing promoted acceptance when recipients responded with high stress. ► This interaction was limited to recipients interacting with a high power allocator. ► The perspective of victims of unfairness helps us understand how social accounts work.
Introduction
Concerns about fairness impact behavior in bargaining situations significantly, as illustrated by bargainers’ tendency to reject unfair offers in ultimatum bargaining games (see Chaudhuri, 2009, for an overview). Such rejections result because unfair offers arouse anger in victims and, consequently, a desire to “get back at” at the offender (Pillutla & Murnighan, 1996). Unfair offers and the resulting retaliatory behaviors thus make effective and successful bargaining difficult. Unfortunately, such events cannot always be avoided because bargainers’ behavior often reflects their own interests, at the expense of fairness (Van Dijk, De Cremer, & Handgraaf, 2004). This makes it necessary to know how to deal with the emergence of unfairness in order to stimulate effective bargaining.
A growing body of research shows that an effective way to deal with wrongful and unfair acts may be the provision of a social account in which the offender denies responsibility, or conversely, apologizes by accepting responsibility for the harm done and issuing a promise to make things better (see Dirks, Lewicki, & Zaheer, 2009, for an overview). The present paper examines how such social accounts can be useful to deal with the emergence of unfairness in ultimatum bargaining situations. Specifically, we will study the impact of apologies and denials of responsibility in promoting acceptance of unfair ultimatum offers.
To examine the effectiveness of these specific social accounts, we, first of all, introduce the moderating role of individual differences in stress levels as a response to uncertainty. Bargaining involves high levels of uncertainty about the interaction partner’s intentions and motives, and also about one’s bargaining outcomes (e.g., De Cremer et al., 2010, Roth, 1995). This uncertainty often induces stress (Greco and Roger, 2001, Greco and Roger, 2003). We argue that whether bargainers respond to uncertainty with heightened stress or not determines how they experience the violation of an unfair ultimatum offer. Apologies and denials each address specific violation experiences (Ren & Gray, 2009). Hence, the effectiveness of a specific social account in promoting acceptance of unfair ultimatum offers should be contingent upon individual differences in bargainers’ stress levels as a response to uncertainty.
Further, as a stringent test of our idea that the effectiveness of specific social accounts results because they address specific violation experiences that can result from receiving an unfair ultimatum offer, we examine the role of bargainers’ power as a boundary condition to this effect. Power influences whether people feel vulnerable in their interactions with others and, consequently, whether they attempt to assess their interaction partner’s intentions and motives (e.g., Fiske, 2001, Rusbult and van Lange, 2003). Hence, bargainers’ power should influence whether social accounts (as a function of stress responses) will promote acceptance of unfair ultimatum offers.
We will test our hypotheses in two ultimatum bargaining studies (Güth, Schmittberger, & Schwarze, 1982). All our participants are assigned the role of recipient and receive an unfair offer (i.e. 60% for the allocator and 40% for the recipient). The allocator then issues a denial or an apology for the unfair offer. In order to be able to compare the relative effectiveness of denials and apologies, it is important that both a denial and an apology are credible as social accounts. We therefore introduce some ambiguity in the procedure regarding whether the allocator is responsible for the unfair offer (taken from De Cremer et al., 2010; see also Kim, Ferrin, Cooper, & Dirks, 2004). We vary the power structure of the game by varying recipients’ power to reject the offer (taken from Suleiman, 1996).
Section snippets
Social accounts in ultimatum bargaining
Denial of responsibility is often an effective response to a transgression (that is, when no evidence directly links one to the offense; Kim et al., 2004). This is because denials provide a clear explanation of what happened in the situation (Ren & Gray, 2009) and, at the same time, shift responsibility attributions from the offender to other actors or to the situation (Weiner, Graham, Peter, & Zmuidinas, 1991). A credible denial thus leaves trust in the interaction partner and, consequently,
Social accounts and stress responses to uncertainty
One relevant individual difference factor in ultimatum bargaining is whether people respond to uncertainty with elevated stress (Greco and Roger, 2001, Greco and Roger, 2003). As noted earlier, bargaining involves high levels of uncertainty about the interaction partner’s intentions and motives, and also about bargaining outcomes (e.g., De Cremer et al., 2010). People often find uncertainty aversive (Curley et al., 1986, Kuhn, 1997) and research has identified uncertainty as a prime antecedent
Power, stress responses to uncertainty, and social accounts
People attempt to understand their interaction partners’ intentions and motives particularly when interacting with high power others (e.g., Rusbult & van Lange, 2003). This is because high power interaction partners can easily abuse their power to exploit their low power counterpart. Low power interaction partners can do little to avoid this, because their actions have, by definition, fewer consequences for the other party’s outcomes. This makes low power interaction partners attempt to
Participants and design
95 part-time undergraduate psychology students (70 females and 25 males; Mage = 39.84 years, SD = 9.66) participated on a voluntary basis. They were randomly assigned to a 2 (allocator power: shared vs. high) × 2 (social account: denial versus apology) between-participants factorial design.
Procedure
The first part of the procedure introduced the participants to their role of recipient in the ultimatum bargaining game. Undergraduate students were invited to participate in a bargaining study. All communication
Study 2
Study 1 revealed clear support for our hypotheses: Apologies were more effective among recipients who did respond to uncertainty with elevated stress (Hypothesis 1). Conversely, denials were more effective in stimulating acceptance of an unfair offer among recipients who did not react to uncertainty with elevated stress (Hypothesis 2). Moreover, and as expected, this cross-over interaction was restricted to recipients who interacted with a powerful allocator. Among recipients who shared power
Discussion and concluding remarks
Two experiments consistently support the theoretical notion that the effectiveness of social accounts in stimulating acceptance of an unfair ultimatum offer depends on how the violation is perceived, that is, as an identity violation or a control violation. Based on this notion we formulated three hypotheses, which were all supported in both studies: Apologies are particularly effective in stimulating acceptance of unfair offers among recipients who respond to uncertainty with high, rather than
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2013, Journal of Experimental Social PsychologyCitation Excerpt :Apologies, therefore, imply that perpetrators distance themselves from their prior actions and admit being wrong. The effectiveness of apologies in promoting trust and forgiveness among victims has been supported by a wealth of research (see e.g., Bottom, Gibson, Daniels, & Murnighan, 2002; De Cremer & Schouten, 2008; Exline, Deshea, & Holeman, 2007; Ohbuchi, Kameda, & Agarie, 1989; Van Dijke & De Cremer, 2011). It is important to note that apologies have rather different meanings for victims and perpetrators, and they fulfill different psychological needs.
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