Saying sorry may sometimes make things worse: study

Washington : Saying sorry when making a social rejection can have the opposite effect of its intention, a study has found. “Contrary to popular belief, apologies do not soften the blow of rejections,” said Gili Freedman, from Dartmouth College in the US.

“Most people have had the experience of wanting to minimise the hurt of the person they are rejecting. But how exactly do you do that?” Freedman added. Researchers found that despite their good intentions, people are going about it the wrong way. They often apologise, but that makes people feel worse and that they have to forgive the rejector before they are ready.

Social norms dictate that we should forgive someone if they apologise, which puts the targets of social rejection in a difficult position if they are not ready to do this or think the apology is insincere. Researchers performed several different tests to assess how often apologies were included in a social rejection and how the recipients felt and responded to them.

They found 39 per cent of people included an apology when asked to write a ‘good way of saying no’ to a social request, such as being able to meet up or to be roommates again. When asked how they would feel when in this position themselves, those people showed a rejection containing an apology reported higher feelings of hurt.

The team carried out specially designed face-to-face rejection experiments to account for the fact that people do not like to admit negative feelings, such as the pain of rejection. “We know that people often do not want to admit that they have hurt feelings, so in some of the studies, we looked at how much people wanted to seek revenge,” Freedman said.

It showed that those offered an apology when rejected from a set of group tasks, which included a taste test of hot sauce, exacted revenge by allocating more sauce to the person who had rejected them. This was despite being told they had a strong aversion spicy food, researchers said.

Lastly, the researchers asked participants to view a video of a rejection in action, to assess if feelings of forgiveness can be affected. They found that those who saw the recipient receiving an apology thought they would feel more obliged to express forgiveness, despite not feeling it.

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.