Why sorry seems to be the hardest word in a relationship - Women's Agenda

Why sorry seems to be the hardest word in a relationship

Sorry seems to be the hardest word, crooned Elton John 37 years ago.

Usually, we think this is because of pride. But navigating apologies effectively isn’t simply a matter of saying the words and meaning them.

    Psychologists say a sincere apology has three stages:

  • An admission of regretful guilt
  • A clear ‘I’m sorry’ statement
  • A request for forgiveness

But even if you are sincere, and you follow the above, you might not patch things up successfully. That’s because it’s not your perception of your apology that matters. It’s the other person’s; the one you’ve wronged.
Luckily for us, psychologists in the past decade or so have spent a fair amount of time looking at what does and doesn’t make an apology successfully. It varies across cultures, but in the West, here’s some of what they found.

  1. Fools rush in

    Usually, we’re told to apologise quickly when we’re in the wrong. But research reveals we’re better off waiting, at least for a little while.

    C Frantz and C Benningson in 2001 published a paper on the topic in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

    Frantz and Benningson first asked people to describe recent conflicts in which they’d received an apology. They found that in situations where an apology wasn’t offered right away, the wronged party was more satisfied.

    The psychologists then randomly assigned participants one of three written accounts of a conflict situation.

    In the accounts, someone provided an apology at the start or the end of the conversation, or didn’t apologise at all. The later apology was perceived as the most effective.

    It’s hard to draw causal links from the study, but the researchers thought it was because both parties had a chance to be heard and understood when apologies were offered later in the conflict.

    So really, apologies are most effective when the person you’ve wronged thinks you know what you’re apologising for, and when they’ve had a bit of a chance to tell you what an idiot you’ve been.

     

  2. Don’t be surprised if an apology on its own isn’t enough

    When people are wronged, they want an apology. But recent research shows that when people do get an apology, they don’t value it as much as they thought they would.

    An interesting study was published last year by psychologists David De Cremer and Chris Reinders Folmer of Erasmus University in The Netherlands, and Madan M. Pillutla from the London Business School.

    In the midst of the GFC, many wanted banks to apologise for causing the crisis. “Banks didn’t want to apologise because they didn’t feel guilty, but in the public eye, banks were guilty,” De Cremer says. But even when some banks and CEOs did apologise, the public didn’t seem to feel any better. “We wondered, what was the real value of an apology?” De Cremer and his colleagues set about testing this.

    They got sets of volunteers, who could only communicate by computer. One received 30 euros, but could only share 5 euros of this with their partner. Some of the partners apologised for this, while others didn’t. When someone didn’t apologise, the researchers told the volunteer to imagine they’d received an apology

    They then asked half the volunteers how they felt about the apology. The ones who received one didn’t value it very much at all. The others, who imagined an apology, did.

    The moral of the story: even when people want an apology, it might not make them feel all that better on its own. “I think an apology is a first step in the reconciliation process,” De Cremer says. But “you need to show that you will do something else”.

  3. Consider your relationship

    The best apologies take into account the dynamics of your relationship with the person or group you’re apologising to.

    Ryan Fehr and Michele Gelfand of the University of Maryland have conducted a series of studies examining the different components of apologies – “expressions of empathy, offers of compensation, and acknowledgement of the violation of social norms”.

    They found that people responded best to apologies that reflected their general relationship to the person apologising. People who were wronged by someone they were close to, such as a spouse, appreciated expressions of empathy. When it came to professional relationships, offers of compensation went down well.

    But when apologising to people you like but aren’t overly close to, or to larger groups, acknowledging that you’ve violated social norms will go down best. Your apologies should get to the emotional root of the hurt you caused. And different groups expect different things from you.

 

Research mentioned:

Better late than early: The influence of timing on apology effectiveness” – Journal of experimental psychology, 2001.

“How important is an apology to you? Forecasting errors in evaluating the value of apologies” – Psychological Science, 2011

“When apologies work: How matching apology components to victims’ self-construals facilitates forgiveness” – Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2010.

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