The Power of an Apology

A recent study found that apologizing may save a lot of money and trouble. People often have a hard time apologizing, even when they know they made mistakes. Fear of apologizing may be a habit worth breaking.

An English company sold products on the internet. They had a large number of customers. Occasionally they made mistakes with customer orders, which raised the question of how to handle the occasional mistake. As an experiment, they handled this problem in two ways: Some customers received emails expressing apologies for the mistake, while other customers received money as compensation.

What the company found is that people who received written apologies reacted more positively than people who received money as compensation. Judging by the criterion used in this study, the verbal apology customers were twice as satisfied with their results than the people who got paid to forget their problems.

In this case, customers seemed to react to the written apologies as if they were more sincere than cash handouts. Possibly people reacted to the offer of money (which was often the equivalent of five Euros, but sometimes more) as an insincere bribe o. Somehow the words of the apology seemed more 'human' and sincere.

The Experiment's Limits

The study seems to encourage 'niceness' for the sake of good relations, which, if true, is an encouraging result in that it shows that people value good social etiquette over money. But, like any social science experiment, there are a lot of questions that cannot be settled by a single experiment.

For example, it appears from the report that most of the customers were from England. Therefore, the experiment would need to be performed with customers in other countries to determine if similar results are obtained.

It is also unknown what products the customers purchased. Do people settle for written apologies when the product they buy is of little monetary value, as opposed to an expensive purchase? The price of the purchase is another variable that would need to be studied.

An interesting footnote to the study is that the apologies were written by professional apologists. It seems there are professionals and entire companies that exist to apologize. A follow-up study may also examine whether amateur apologies received the same reaction as an apology written by a professional.

Cognitive Dissonance and Accepting Apologies Instead of Money

The term 'cognitive dissonance' has migrated from the laboratories of psychologists to the average person's vocabulary. A group of psychologists, beginning in the 1960s and into the 1970s, created a theory and did experiements to demonstrate something about the thought processes (cognitions) of most people.

What they claimed is that when two conflicting thought are an active part of the thought processes, people try very hard to find a way to make the two thoughts compatible. This process often produced surprising results.

These researchers did many experiments to demonstrate that people will sometimes settle for smaller material gains in order to preserve their self evaluations. For instance, people will sometimes settle for gaining less money for doing something so that they can still think of themselves as "good" or "civic-minded" or "objective." If they accept money for a task, they may feel they've "tainted" their self-esteem, as they don't want others to assume they took a particular action to completed a particular task solely for the purpose of earning money.

It's possible this experiment with the English internet seller hit the chord of cognitive dissonance. People may prefer an apology over money, lest they feel they've "sold out" for a bribe.