Bank chiefs, oil company executives and notorious politicians seem as hypersensitive to admitting guilt as the public is eager t

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问题     Bank chiefs, oil company executives and notorious politicians seem as hypersensitive to admitting guilt as the public is eager to extract self-reproach from them. If sometimes we seem to scrutinize people more for their failure to say, "I’m sorry," than for the breaches themselves, it is partly due to the cultural wisdom that an apology is the first step in mending a broken relationship.
    Our collective desire for apologies, though, may not be a great indicator of their effect once delivered. Studies by a team of researchers of the Rotterdam School of Management have shown that people are poor forecasters of their emotional responses to life and tend to overestimate future reactions to both positive and negative situations.
    To simulate betrayals of trust, the researchers set up games and manipulated them. Participants were given ¢10 to either keep or transfer in whole to a partner, in which case, participants were told, the amount would be tripled and their partner would decide how to split the total. Once the transfers took place, participants were informed that their partners had decided to return only ¢15. Each participant then received a written apology in which his or her partner expressed regret and acknowledged responsibility for the unfair trade. For comparison another group of participants played the trust game to the same outcome but were asked to imagine receiving an apology. A third group was asked to imagine the entire scenario, breach and apology.
    In their post-game analysis, participants who imagined the apology, regardless of whether the breach was real or imagined, rated the apology as more "valuable" and "reconciling" than did participants who actually received one.
    In a follow-up study the same participants repeated the game with the same mean but regretful partners, this time getting to choose how much of the initial ¢10 to transfer. "Because participants were exploited in the first game, this amount is a behavioral measure of trust restoration. Participants imagining the entire scenario predicted they would transfer on average ¢5. 20. Those who actually received an apology in the first game, however, were less trusting of their partners the second time around, handing over an average of ¢3. 31.
    If apologies are not inherently as valuable as we believe, they are still effective in restoring social order because they trigger a highly scripted reconciliation process. Once an apology is offered, the pressure is then on "victims" to accept and move on. Ironically, the failure to accept an apology transforms the victim into the sinner. Children, less aware of social norms, often fail to graciously accept a regret. And an apology does not necessarily signal regret, add the researchers. Sometimes apologies are offered not to make amends with victims but to signal to an external audience that one is a good person. So, it’s a tricky situation then, when your victim is in the audience.
It can be learned from the last paragraph that______.

选项 A、it is blamable to refuse to accept an apology
B、it is a tricky practice to express your regret
C、apologies are sometimes made to keep a good public image
D、apologies are not very effective in restoring social order

答案C

解析 文章末句指出,道歉不一定是为了与他人重归于好,而是为了向旁观者表明自己是个好人。可见,[C]选项正确,to signal to an external audience that one is a good person与keep a good pub—lic image属于同义转换。
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