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Research Brief: Better to Be Safe with a Sorry
"Never apologize, mister," John Wayne's character famously said in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. "It's a sign of weakness." And while previous academic research has similarly concluded that apologizing during negotiations hurts perceptions of power, those ideas were "never tested," says Alison Wood Brooks, an assistant professor in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit.
In a recent paper, Brooks offers a counter to that prevailing wisdom, detailing four study situations where an apology for things out of anyone's control—e.g., the weather, a flight delay—increased a host of interpersonal positives, including likability and trust. In one of the studies, Brooks and her fellow researchers had a man approach 65 people in Philadelphia's busy 30th Street Station railway hub on a rainy day and ask to use their cellphone, employing one of two approaches: one where he simply asked to borrow the phone, and a second where he prefaced the ask with, "I'm so sorry about the rain!" The first version produced a successful outcome only 9 percent of the time; the "weather apology" version had a success rate more than five times greater, with 47 percent of the people handing over their phones.
The studies indicate that not only are these "superfluous apologies" a useful social influencer, says Brooks, but also their benefits don't come at the expense of power perceptions. "Especially in negotiations, people try to get away with not apologizing—particularly when it's not clear who is at fault," she says. "And what we've learned here is that maybe it is in your best interest to apologize. If it helps when you are clearly not at fault, it may also help when blame is ambiguous."
—Dan Morrell
"I'm Sorry About the Rain! Superfluous Apologies Demonstrate Empathic Concern and Increase Trust," by Alison Wood Brooks, Hengchen Dai, and Maurice E. Schweitzer, Social Psychological and Personality Science.
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