Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) has engaged the interest of social and personality psychologists as it has deep implications for the psychology of intergroup conflict, particularly regarding factors such as prejudice and discrimination, as well as international conflict resolution. Nevertheless, few studies have directly assessed how SDO relates to intergroup reconciliation. This study (effective N = 819) measured participants’ SDO along with their attitudes toward various governmental apologies to test the hypothesis that SDO is associated with unwillingness to issue intergroup apologies. The results showed that SDO was negatively correlated with supportive attitudes toward government-issued international apologies. This negative correlation remained intact after controlling for the effects of political conservatism and militarism.

Apologies by political leaders to the citizens of a victimized country have attracted attention in recent years as a means of improving relations between nations. Existing studies have identified several elements that make such an apology effective, but from the politician's point of view, it is difficult to issue a statement containing all these elements, and they must then be chosen while considering domestic backlash and relations with countries other than the victimized one. However, it is not sufficiently clear how the victimized country's citizens weigh the elements of the apology when they accept it and how the nature of the harm caused changes this. Therefore, we conducted a survey experiment in Japan, adopting a conjoint design using scenarios depicting fictional US presidential apologies to Japan. Our experiment demonstrated three attributes particularly regarded as important in determining whether people would accept an apology: the reparation amount, whether the apology was official (formality), and the voluntariness of the apology. However, when something that people consider “sacred” has been harmed, reparation proposals are counterproductive, and the optimal apology form may depend on the nature of the harm.

Despite widespread concern over heated diplomatic debates and growing interest in public diplomacy, it is still incompletely understood what type of message is more effective for gaining support from foreign public, or the international society, in situations where disputing countries compete in diplomatic campaigns. This study, through multiple survey experiments, uncovers the effect of being silent, issuing positive justification, and negative accusation, in interaction with the opponent's strategy. We demonstrate that negative verbal attacks "work" and undermine the target's popularity as they do in electoral campaigns. Unlike domestic electoral campaigns, however, negative diplomacy has little "backlash" and persuades people to support the attacker. Consequently, mutual verbal fights make neither party more popular than the other. Nevertheless, this does not discourage disputants from waging verbal fights due to the structure similar to the one-shot prisoner's dilemma. We also find that positive messages are highly context-dependent-that is, their effects greatly depend on the opponent's strategy and value proximity between the messenger and the receiver.

Political apologies, which typically consist of (a) admission of injustice/wrongdoing, (b) acknowledgment of harm and/or victim suffering, (c) expression of remorse, (d) acceptance of responsibility, (e) offer of repair, and (f) forbearance, often meet opposition from the constituency of the apologizing government. This study investigated which of these 6 elements people would most strongly oppose. Eight hundred Japanese participants (400 men and 400 women, aged 20 to 79 years) indicated how much resistance they would feel to the Japanese government's expression of each of the 6 elements in a hypothetical political apology to an (unspecified) Asian country. The strongest resistance was associated with elements (a), (b), and (c), followed by elements (d) and (e), and the weakest resistance was reported for element (f). An exploratory cluster analysis identified the existence of a minority of the most resistant individuals (n ϭ 64), whose mean resistance scores for elements (a) to (e) were greater than 5.5 on a 7-point scale. This group most strongly opposed elements (c) and (d), which were not the elements that the entire sample most strongly opposed. The most resistant individuals appear to have different sentiments regarding their government's political apologies than the rest of the population. Public Significance StatementPolitical apologies often meet opposition from the constituency of the apologizing government. This study revealed that there is a minority of Japanese citizens (possibly less than 10% of the population) who mostly strongly opposes the Japanese government issuing political apologies.

No abstract