Human beings are incredibly social animals, being one of the few species that cooperates in groups of thousands, and the only one that cooperates amongst individuals that don’t share the same genes, unlike bees or ants that breed with a queen.  Our ultra-sociality leads us to interesting behaviors where we follow the leads of others as in these social influence videos.

Social influence operates in the realm of reconciliation as well, as evidenced by this recent paper published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology by Fiona Barlow and colleagues.  In this study, the novel way that social influence was used was to get members of a perpetrator group (non-Aboriginal Australians) to be more willing to reconcile by having members of a group apologize and then having other members of that same group (as opposed to the aggrieved other group) accept the apology.

From the article:

There is an implicit assumption that perpetrators’ moral image restoration following an intergroup apology depends on absolution from victims. In this paper we examine whether perpetrators can in fact look to other ingroup members for moral pardon. In Studies 1 and 4, Australians read an apology to Indian people for a series of assaults on Indian nationals in Australia. In Studies 2 and 3, non-Aboriginal Australians were provided with apologies offered on their behalf to Aboriginal Australians. In each study participants were told that other perpetrator group members had either accepted or rejected the apology. In line with predictions, when perpetrator group members heard that fellow perpetrators accepted an apology made to victims they felt morally restored, and consequently were more willing to reconcile. Effects were largely unqualified by apology quality (Studies 2–4), and held in the face of victim group apology rejection (Studies 3–4). We demonstrate that perpetrator group members can effectively gain moral redemption by accepting their own apologies, even qualified ones that have proved insufficient to victim groups.

How can readers of this site use this research?  As has been found in other research areas, seeing information that implies that relationships between groups are being improved, even in a somewhat illogical way, leads to the reality of relationships between groups being improved.  In this way, information about how divided and in-conflict any two groups are leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy as does information on how united and/or related two groups are.  Given that most groups have a mixture of this information available, it would seem useful to emphasize the later when one wants to increase the chances of reconcilliation and bridge moral divisions.

– Ravi Iyer