The Impact of Failing to Give an Apology and the Need-for-Cognition on Anger

This study examined how failing to give an apology would affect the anger of persons high and low in the need-for-cognition. We hypothesized that failing to apologize when there was an opportunity would lead to more anger than a no communication control condition, and that apologizing would lead to less anger than the control condition. Further, we hypothesized that these effects would be particularly strong in participants with a low need-for-cognition. To test these hypotheses 60 participants were put in an anger inducing situation and randomly assigned to one of three conditions: apology, no apology (fail to apologize), and control condition where there was no opportunity for an apology. As predicted, failure to apologize was associated with more anger than the control condition. With participants low in the need-for-cognition, the failure to apologize resulted in more anger than either the no communication control or the apology condition.