How to apologize
By: Joe Robbins
Tags: Emotional Intelligence, Personal Growth, How To, Business, Personal Development

F**k!

Is all I can think. I’m going to be late again.

On the drive, I’m trying to rationalize why I’m running late. I’m having a pretend conversation with my sister (the person I’m late to see). I’m trying to convince her imaginary avatar why I couldn’t be on time. Should I say the traffic was horrible? No, that’s not believable.

Should I blame it on my lack of sleep… hmm, that sounds better. I can weave a narrative here.

I can say I had trouble sleeping and needed a couple of extra minutes to make up for it. I mean, it’d be dangerous to drive if I didn’t have them. She wouldn't want to see her only brother die in a fiery car crash so that he could be on time.

I arrive 15 minutes late and blurt out, “Kelsey! I had a rough time sleeping last night. I probably only got 3 hours. I had to sleep in a little bit to make up for it. I’m sorry, I’m late.”

She’s noticeably annoyed, but it’s nothing that will ruin our relationship.

I couldn’t help but feel bad for being late and for feeling like I screwed up the apology.

The sorry seemed stale and contrived. I was actually on 3 hours of sleep that night, but that doesn’t mean it’s ok to be late and waste Kelsey’s time.

My attempt at apologizing was pitiful.

As I rolled around in my bed that night, I kept thinking back to that apology.

How could I have said sorry better?

Is there a formula I could follow? How can I feel better about an apology? How can I let the other person know I mean it?

These questions and being late to see my sister led me down a rabbit hole of research papers and podcasts to learn how to give the best possible apology.

The science of apologies

Image by kalhh from Pixabay

Initially, I had no idea if this was a subject anyone had researched before. Even if it was, how would you prove empirically that one apology was better than another?

This is where Karen A. Credulo and Jane M. Ruane come in.

These two sociologists from Rutgers University dissected 183 public apologies from celebrities to figure out what made an apology great or disastrous.

Why did they use apologies from celebrities?

Well, these apologies were almost always followed by a public opinion poll. They were able to use those polls and general public sentiment about the celebrity before and after the apology to determine how effective the apology was.

Some of the famous apologies they studied were given by Bill Clinton, Rosie O’Donnel, and Chris Brown.

After deconstructing the apologies, they found ways to format your apology to make it much more effective.

How to structure your apology

Karen A. Credulo and Jane M. Ruane noticed two compelling apology sequences. One produced a high rate of forgiveness; the other produced a lot of scorn.

The offender-driven sequence [don’t use this one]

This is the sequence I used when apologizing to my sister.

Breakdown of the apology to my sister

The offender driven sequence is when you start with a focus on the offender (you) followed by the apology and possibly an act of restitution ( for example, “I won’t let it happen again”)

This isn’t an effective way to apologize. Why?

Because we, as humans, are naturally self-centered. I don’t want to hear why you’re late; I want to hear that you understand the inconvenience you’ve caused me.

Instead of spending my time in the car, thinking about how I could make myself the victim, I should have been thinking about how it must have made Kelsey feel.

The victim-driven sequence [use this one]

This is the sequence I should have used to apologize to my sister.

How I should have apologized to my sister

The victim driven sequence focuses on the person that was hurt in the exchange and is followed by an apology and then finally an act of restitution.

Why does this work well?

Instead of trying to justify the bad thing you did, you immediately own it. You’re saying I know I messed up and that it hurt you. People want to see that we understand the pain and trouble we caused them.

No one wants to hear the excuse for why you caused them pain, suffering, or inconvenience. They want to hear that you’re sorry for it.

“Never make excuses. Your friends don’t need them and your foes won’t believe them.” — John Wooden

How to time your apology?

It turns out that the answer to this question is straightforward. There is no special sequence to follow or magic to be done.

The data shows that the sooner you apologize, the more likely you are to be forgiven. The longer you wait, the worse off you are.

Now, this doesn’t mean that just because it’s taken you time to apologize that you shouldn’t. It just means that there’s no better time to apologize than today.

Apologies must be costly

“Sacrifice is at the heart of repentance. Without deeds, your apology is worthless. “— Bryan Davis

After digging through research papers a little more, I found one of the coolest consumer experiments I’d ever heard of.

Every day there are over 15 million Uber rides. And as you can imagine, when you’re dealing with that many of anything, there are bound to be mess-ups.

And those mess ups are costly!

An Uber passenger that’s dropped off more than 10 minutes late will, on average, spend 10% less on the platform. 10% is a big number for a company that works on thin margins.

So what should Uber do when a customer get’s dropped off late? How can they repair the relationship? Should they apologize? and if so, how?

Famous economist John List and researcher at Vassar college Benjamin Ho were given free rein to run experiments on Uber passengers to figure that out.

They split up a disgruntled group of 1.6 million Uber passengers and went to work (all of the passengers were dropped off 10 minutes or more late).

Some passengers received an apology email, some a $5 coupon, others nothing at all, and another group got a $5 coupon along with an apology email.

They found that the apology email, by itself, didn’t help Uber at all. The apology email had to be coupled with the $5 coupon to have an effect.

The apology coupon combo lead to an average increase in spending of 2%. This might sound insignificant, but when you are talking about millions of rides every day, 2% can make or break a business.

The danger of apologizing

Interestingly the other big finding in the Uber study was that apologies have the potential to backfire massively.

If a customer who was given an apology was subsequently dropped off late again, their future spending fell by a lot. The drop in spending was greater than had Uber not even apologized in the first place.

The customers saw the apology as a sort of promise that Uber wouldn’t drop them off late again. When the customer was dropped off late again it was interpreted as the breaking of a promise.

Moral of the story, if you apologize, you better keep your word.

Good luck!

One of the few guarantees in life is that we will f*ck up a lot.

Wisdom intelligence, technology, and experience might help us f*ck up less, but we’ll never fully escape its grasp. That being the case, I hope this article could share some guidance on how to proceed when we inevitably need to say sorry.