Resistance to the six elements of political apologies: Who opposes which elements?

Journal article

Ohtsubo, Yohsuke; Kazunori Inamasu; Shoko Kohama; Nobuhiro Mifune & Atsushi Tago (2020) Resistance to the six elements of political apologies: Who opposes which elements?, Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology. DOI: 10.1037/pac0000456.

Download Reviewed, pre-typeset version
.pdf

This is the Reviewed, pre-typeset version of the article. The final, definitive version can be found at the journal’s website. This publication may be subject to copyright: please visit the publisher’s website for details. All rights reserved.

Download Final publication
.pdf

This is the Version of Record of the publication, available here in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. This publication may be subject to copyright: please visit the publisher’s website for details. All rights reserved.

Read the article here

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 = 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.

An error has occurred. This application may no longer respond until reloaded. An unhandled exception has occurred. See browser dev tools for details. Reload 🗙