Why Your Apology Made Everything Worse

Big thoughts, quick talk, flip facts, tick talk, level up your mind, every single line. Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Humanity of Conflict Podcast. My name is Rob McLaughlin. Let's get into it. Researchers have found that a partial apology, the kind that most of us inevitably are knowingly unintentionally give, actually makes the other person less willing to resolve things, to forgive you, to move on, to feel good, than if you said nothing at all.

Right guys, this is research data, we're going to get into it today. We're going to get into the six components to an effective apology and we're going to learn that the one that we lead with most often actually ranks dead last in terms of efficacy. So once again, this is the anatomy of Conflict Podcast. Thanks for being here. Let's get straight into it now.

I'm not going to give you a hypothetical story or a story about Bob and Jack and Susie who had a conflict and they had an apology and the apology was bonked because we all know from our own personal and professional experience, I know from my personal foibles, right, our relationship with our partner, our relationship with their kids, our relationship with our family members, and then professionally as a second holding on their story.

But we make mistakes, we apologize, and sometimes those apologies are better than others. Oftentimes it's not great, right? It's not a great process. The other person's face might go flat. You realize a lot of times that the apology made things a little bit worse rather than better. And today I want to dissect so that when you leave this podcast, you know exactly why. Exactly why your apologies in the future will succeed or fail. You will understand the recipe for success. You will understand the neurological mechanisms behind the structure and why they work and why they don't work all in the next 30 minutes. I know it's a tall order, but that's what we got. That's what we're going to do. Ready, set, go.

All right, so we're going to dive into a few studies. And that's how the podcast today is going to be organized. So the first study is if you guys want to look it up, this is from Ohio State, published a negotiation and conflict management research in 2016, Lewicki, Pauline and Loant. They tested apology components, six of them. They broke apologies down to six pieces. They studied them and they found, hey, if we combine one, three or six, how effective and incredible do the people who are being apologized to receive them? They ran two experiments, almost a thousand participants. And here's the components.

And I think like it's worth at the beginning here thinking about, hey, what the heck are the components of an apology? If you're to ask me off the top of my head, what are the components of an apology? I would say, well, you say you're sorry. You say the action that you're sorry for. You say maybe that you're not going to do it again in the future. I'm sorry. I was short with you last night. Maybe say I was frustrated. You kind of explain why. In the future, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to take the empty breaths. If you say like, you recognize something about them, like I know this probably affected your day. I don't know, I don't know the size. That's why we're going to get into it.

So here's the six. Number one, expression of regret. Number two, explanation of what went wrong. Number three, acknowledgement of responsibility. Number four, commitment to change. Number five, offer of repair. And number six, request for forgiveness. Now, as you might guess, the apologies that had more of these components were generally more effective. Well, here's the thing. And here's what's interesting. Here's why I pulled this study. It's not an equal hierarchy, right? All of these aren't equal. It's not like you miss one.

So the question then is which ones matter most and why? So the number one most important on this list was predictably the acknowledgement of responsibility. When you say I was wrong, it was my fault. This is the one that moves the need on most. Number two is the offer of repair. And this, it didn't surprise me, but I didn't necessarily explicitly know this, right? I'm learning this. The offer of repair is number two, move the needle second most, second to the acknowledgement of responsibility. And the acknowledgement of repair is, hey, here's what I'm going to do to fix the fact that I made a mistake. And this signals that we all know talk is cheap, but you're committing to an action.

A number three is an expression of regret, which is different than an offer of repair and an acknowledgement of responsibility. This is an explanation of what went wrong for you. That a defense of what went wrong, but an explanation of I understand the circumstances. So it gives context and validity to my offer to repair and my acknowledgement of responsibility.

Okay, top three. That makes sense. So we're just beginning to, we're going to peel in, we're going to peel back the layers and really study an apology and its components. As sort of academic peer reviewed studies have studied them. So one last finding from this study before we move on is that this is sort of incidental, but it is worth knowing that apologies for competence failures versus apologies for integrity failures.

So when you knowingly did something wrong versus when you made a mistake, they're generally received better, which makes sense because it's very hard to overcome a hurdle when it's very hard to have an apology land when you intentionally did something wrong. All right, study number two, the apology that is worse than silence. This is a 2003 study published in the Michigan Law Review, 145 participants, this is Jennifer Robinult. I'm going to give a scenario. Let's say you've been, let's make it not personal. Let's say you, a bicyclist hits you or you hit a bicyclist, you're injured and you're offered money, a settlement to cover their menopause.

Now in this context, in a personal injury universe, for example, there are three scenarios in this study. One where there's no apology and just the offer. Two where there's a full apology where you accept full responsibility and an offer to settle. And three, and I believe the offers to settle at the same. And three, a partial a partial apology, which is deemed as, hey, I'm sorry this has happened. I'm sorry this happened to you. I'm sorry you're going through this, but no personal responsibility, no acceptance of fault.

So the interesting finding here is that, well, let's go through the data. When you don't apologize at all, 52% of the time, the playoffs accept the settlement offer. When you give a full apology, 73% of the time the offer is accepted. So there's a huge increase. If you give a full apology, there's a 25% increase of acceptance rates. It matters a lot. However, if you give a partial apology, it's only a 35% acceptance rate, which means it's significantly worse than if you had offered no apology at all. It's worse. From 52% with no apology to 35% with a partial apology. What this means is that partial apologies make things worse. It makes things worse than saying absolutely nothing.

This is huge, huge, huge, huge, huge. This is like worth playing on repeat over and over again. It's to say you need to study and nail the art of making effective apologies, knowing that context is different. Everyone receives things differently. We need to get out of and away from the non-apology apologies. Let's just let's just go through four of the biggest non-apology apologies. The research calls these the counterfeit apologies, the fake apologies. Number one is, and I've said this probably a hundred probably a thousand times. I'm sorry that you feel this way. And this is a fail because it deflects ownership. I'm sorry, you feel this way. It deflects ownership onto the other person's emotions.

The second fake apology is, I'm sorry if I'm sorry if this upset you, I'm sorry if I didn't show up the way you want to. I'm sorry if the if is a conditional, right? It's making the whole apology hinge on something. It implies it it might not matter. It might like you're hinging your your hedging your words and here words matter. Number three, and I'm guilty of this so much, is the I'm sorry but because everything before the but gets erased because you say I'm sorry that I was short, but you know when you walk into the house and you're yelling at me like what else did you expect, right? The but negates everything. And lastly, and I've said this as well, I already said that I was sorry.

And it treats and look, the person might be right. They may have already said the apology and that might be frustrating and that might be like another problem, but it treats the apology as if once you apologize, the transactions closed and the repair should be received, it should be received instantaneously. And let's, I've heard these in my own personal life. I've heard all four of these in-mediation sessions and it's worth pinning to the fridge to really study these or replaying this podcast, okay? Let's move on. Another study, another round of data, another round of insight. And this is the gotman data.

We all know and love John and Julie Gottman, love lab, 40 plus years of research on couples and what makes them tick. And here's where they come in. And this is about the nervous system. When your nervous system literally can't cure an apology, it can't process an apology, it can't, it's not a good time, not a good time for an apology.

So the apologies aren't landing, not because of what you're saying, but because when you're saying it. And this is when you're in a fight and you're flooded and there's cortisol flooding through your body, that lasts from moment one 20 to 30 minutes. And so you got to wait it out, you got to wait out the flooding until you're deescalated. Another way of looking at this is you put a heart rate monitor on. This is for most people, it's not for everyone like athletes, bodies are different, right? Because I looked into this.

When your heart rate generally exceeds 100 beats per minute in a fight, your prefrontal cortex, we're going to get really familiar with brain anatomy, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that handles amongst other things, taking perspective, handles language processing, handles empathy, that part goes roughly basically relatively speaking offline. And then we're in amygdala mode and amygdala can't distinguish between a rational threat that a partner offended you or co-worker offended you and a bear charging through you, right?

And so your partner raising their voice activates rings the doorbell on the same neuropsychetry that it would be if a stranger would and stranger the subway at night in New York City was lunging towards you with a knife. It's the same I gotta defend myself. Okay, so it's just like we have to be mindful of timing and how people's brain chemistry is working. And this is also huge and I often, in mediation, I'm cognizant of this in terms of taking breaks. And then as soon as I switch to my own personal life, it's like that part of my brain that has that sort of meta-situational awareness also goes offline.

So I'm working on this this personally as well. Should I do one more thing? Yeah, I'm going to do one more thing. No, I'm not. I'm going to leave it at that. So that's the Gatman's research. And the Gatman's will come back to you often because they have just such a breadth of research on couples.

And so the lesson here is regulation before repair. You've got to be sort of prefrontal cortex online of Mendoa offline. You've got to have your feet on the floor. And if you can't feel your feet on the floor, if they're not lower than 100 beats per minute, they're not ready to apologize. They're probably not ready to hear it, etc.

Okay, so we covered a lot so far about timing, about structure. Let's do one more. And this is this is again the backfiring apology. And this is from 2018 Evolution and Human Behavior out Sobo. And here the finding that they had in this study is that apologies that cost the apologizer something.

So we're going to call this the cost the apology. If your apology cost do something, it means more. What does this mean? So it could be time, it could be money, could be status, could be convenience. But brain scans show different activations when the person receiving the apology, right, when we're studying their brain, how is it to receive an apology? The person in the other end have to give something real. There's some skin in the game there. Again, it could be different. I think that's really important to know. I don't want to get into the the data and the science here.

But the mechanism is that when the apology cost do something, it feels like you're taking more accountability and you're taking more responsibility. And so I guess the other way of saying it is a free apology where there's just words is a dangerous apology. And there's no risk, when there's no vulnerability, when there's no skin in the game, the apology kind of stops being repaired and it can feel like from the recipient's perspective like it's just empty strategy. And if I'm to connect this into mediation, I've seen people in mediation apologize and I've seen it not land.

And one of the reasons, one of the reasons, if they're saying all the right words, and it's a neuro-regulated space with lower than 100 beats per minute, 20 minutes after cortisol flooding. It might be because the other person sees the apology as you're just apologizing as a matter of strategy because your lawyer told you to or because you want to look good in front of the mediator and very, very often according to these brain scans. The other person knows.

Okay, so I want to wrap up. Let's wrap up. What does a complete apology sound like across spaces? So personal, legal, medical, and the data here is pretty interesting that according to one study, this is Aaron Lazar in his work in 2004 on apology found that your four times more likely to feel forgiven when your apology included an acknowledgement of the impact on the other person.

So here's an example. So not just an acknowledgement of your intent, but an acknowledgement on the impact of the other person. So the intent acknowledgement is I didn't mean to, I didn't mean to fuck that out. I didn't mean to hurt you. I didn't mean to whatever. The impact is, hey, what I did, it caused you pain, it hurt you. And I understand, I understand why. These are structurally, dramatically, meaning different sentences. Most apologies fail. And to be honest, I failed this off like, they fail because they center ourselves as the apology giver. And when they center ourselves, when we're giving the apology and we're speaking, they center ourselves. They center ourselves how?

Because we're saying, hey, I didn't intend, I didn't intend, my intent wasn't x. But that's not the goal of the apology. The goal, purpose and point of the apology is to recognize the other person to recognize the impact on the other person. Really tricky move from thinking about ourselves, to thinking about other people.

And so a fact of apologies, then they center the impact on the other person. And so if we're going to have a heuristic for what's a good apology, one way of just doing is, think about the other person. Use words that make them think that you're thinking about them. And then combine your actions so that you have a plan for, I want to repair this in the future, I'm going to do this, that other thing. And then have a mechanism for having some skin in the game.

So, a lot of good stuff here. Basic model. Don't say, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you. Say, I see that what I did hurt you. This matters to me. I'm sorry. I wasn't my intention, but my intention doesn't undo the impact. Because I think it isn't, we do want to say it wasn't our intention. That is true.

All right, so let's recap. Three things we've got to have for an apology to work. Okay, maybe that time to write this down. Number one, structure. It has to contain the right components. At minimum, what are they? What are we talking about? Acknowledge responsibility. And offer repair. Acknowledge responsibility and offer repair. Two, timing matters. Both nervous systems, not just the person giving the apology, but both nervous systems have to be regulated. The heart rate is above 100, just wait. And number three, probably should cost you something. Vulnerability, convenience, certainty, a free apology often sounds hollow.

All right, so the reason most apologies fail isn't that you don't mean it, isn't that you're a bad person? It's that apologizing well requires the very thing oftentimes that made the conflict happen or made the conflict go awry or makes conflict hard in the first place. It requires dropping your intent, your, your sort of natural inclination to defend yourself. When every part of your body, your nervous system is telling you defend, defend, defend, defend, defend, defend, defend. That's the anatomy of conflict. What's required is first working on our own nervous system, calming down, calming our nervous system down.

And then instead of fight or flight self protection, we can extend an olive branch, extend validation, extend acknowledgement to the other person for purposes of repair. And the good news is this is a learnable trainable skill. All right, guys, my name is Ryan McLaughlin. This is anatomy of conflict. If it was groovy to you, you learned something like share with a friend, with a sibling, with a spouse. And I will see you next episode.