![]() But there was a TWIST! The researchers informed the subjects that there was also a computer that could opt to override the partner’s decisions, whatever they were. If they gave the money away, the researchers would triple the sum (to $18) and the hidden partner could choose to either keep all the money or give half of it ($9) back to the subject. Study 1: Paid volunteers were recruited to play what the researchers called a “trust game.” The subject would be given $6 they could decide to keep or give to an invisible partner in another room. The authors suspected that people who apologize are better liked “even in the absence of culpability,” so they designed four little studies to prove it. Schweitzer, a professor at the Wharton School of Business) note that previous business-related research showed that negotiators who express regret or guilt tend to be better liked than negotiators who don’t. The study’s authors (Alison Wood Brooks, a professor at Harvard Business School Hengchen Dai, now an assistant professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and Maurice E. When Bill Clinton, once seen as our most empathetic president (though nowadays the 1993 headline in The Onion, “New President Feels Nation’s Pain, Breasts” seems more resonant) said, “I’m sorry about the rain” to an audience awaiting his speech, he communicated that he understood their perspective (dampness!), that he recognized the adversity they were coping with, that he was attuned to and thinking about their feelings and experiences. ![]() Such “superfluous apologies” display empathy, and empathy has a positive impact on relationships. Charts on the Internet suggest multiple things to say in multiple situations instead of “I’m sorry.”Ī 2013 study called “I’m Sorry About the Rain! Superfluous Apologies Demonstrate Empathic Concern and Increase Trust,” published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, found that when you apologize for stuff you’re not responsible for - the weather, the traffic, the fact that Tim Horton’s was out of the maple dip - you create a connection with the person you’re apologizing to. Women are constantly informed by people who have not researched apology that they apologize too much. (Here, we’ll do it: “Oh gosh, that moose ate your Timbit, sorry!” and “Pip pip cheerio, terribly sorry someone drove a lorry full of chips into the lift! Arsenal! Tottenham Hotspur!”) ![]() Americans love to mock Canadian and British people for their lily-livered, knee-jerk, obsessive apologizing. Our last president resolutely refused to apologize for anything for four years. Conventional wisdom holds that apologies make you look weak.
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