Family dynamics are amazing. It is fascinating to think about which
relatives are no longer talking to others and to get the story behind the
feuds. These squabbles are the kind of
thing that makes it so hard to create a seating chart at big family
events.
One common theme that emerges from
many family stories centers on violations of trust and the apologies (or lack
of apologies) that come from them. On
the one hand, I can remember sitting with relatives who were still angry after
many years because of some insult or slight, but the real crime that kept the
grudge active was that no apology was offered.
On the other hand, I also remember cases where there was a similar
insult or slight and the apology offered wasn’t judged sufficient.
So, is there any value to
apologies at all?
This question was addressed in a
paper in the January, 2011 issue of Psychological
Science by David DeCremer, Madan Pillutla, and Chris Reinders Folmer. These authors looked at people’s beliefs
about the influence of an apology and their actual reaction to apologies in a
simple situation.
Participants came to the lab and
played a trust game with another player (who was actually an
experimenter). In the trust game,
participants are given money (say $10), and are told that if they give it to
their partner, the experimenter will triple the money (turning it into
$30). The partner can then share as much
of it back with the original partner as possible. The outcome that most people think is fair is
if they give the $10 to their partner, and then the partner returns half of the
total back so that everyone ends up with $15.
In these studies, 90% of the
participants elected to give the $10 to their partner. The partner then returned only $5. At that point, half the participants were
asked to imagine how they would feel if the partner apologized for being
unfair. The other half received an
apology from the partner and were asked how they would feel. Those who imagined getting an apology said
they would feel much better than those who actually received an apology. A followup study showed that people who
received an apology also trusted their partner less in the future than they
thought they would when they imagined receiving an apology.
Why does this happen?
When someone violates your trust
and then fails to apologize, you feel bad both about the violation and the lack
of an apology. When you focus on getting
the apology, then you tend to overestimate the role it is playing in how badly
you feel. If you actually get the
apology, you are still left with the violation of trust, and that feels bad
even if someone did apologize for it.
Ultimately, then, you have to
realize that when someone violates your trust, the apology is not going to make
that hurt go away. You have two options
there. One is to nurse the grudge, or to
actually communicate with the person who violated your trust. Creating a trusting relationship with someone
after a violation requires hard work, and only you can decide whether that work
is worth doing.
In the end you need to recognize
that getting an apology alone is not going to make things better by
itself. So, don’t let your relationship
with someone else rest just on whether they apologized for something they did
wrong.