The impact of voluntariness of apologies on victims’ responses in restorative justice: findings of a quantitative study

Abstract

Apologies are ordered in law without certainty about whether or not recipients perceive ordered and voluntary apologies differently. This exploratory study investigates whether or not the voluntariness of apologies influences recipients’ perceptions of their sincerity, acceptance of apologies, willingness to forgive and intended retributive behaviour. We manipulated the voluntariness of apologies whilst considering offender (age, gender, ethnicity and prior wrongful behaviour) and offence (seriousness) characteristics in 3 studies (ns = 164, 121, 236). Participants adopting the role of a hypothetical victim received either a voluntary or an ordered apology. The voluntary apologies were found to have a significantly more positive impact than the ordered apologies on acceptance and perception of sincerity in all 3 studies and on forgiveness in 2 studies, but did not significantly change participants’ retributive behaviour in any study. Age was the only other variable found to make a significant difference, with younger offenders’ apologies being rated as sincerer.

Keywords:

• acceptance
• apology
• forgiveness
• justice
• law
• restorative

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

We thank Professor Robyn Carroll for her comments on a previous version of this paper and for encouraging us to undertake this research. We further thank Mr James Strickland for his support in setting up Studies 1 and 2 and Ms Aimee Wrightson-Hester for her assistance with the analysis of the data. We presented versions of this paper at the International Network for Law and Apology Research Symposium: Apologies in the Legal Arena – A Comparative Law Perspective in Padova, Italy on 27 September 2019 and at the Psychiatry, Psychology and Law: Collaboration and Challenges Across the South Conference in Singapore on 7 November 2019.

Ethical standards

Declaration of conflicts of interest

Alfred Allan has declared no conflicts of interest.

Justine de Mott has declared no conflicts of interest.

Isolde M. Larkins has declared no conflicts of interest.

Laura Turnbull has declared no conflicts of interest.

Tracey Warwick has declared no conflicts of interest.

Lacey Willet has declared no conflicts of interest.

Maria M. Allan has declared no conflicts of interest.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Edith Cowan University institutional committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study