Imagine that you are a member of a two-person team. Someone you never met, Andrew, is assigned to your team. The team's task is to complete a puzzle. Each correctly placed piece earns the team 25 cents. Everything is going well until Andrew's cell phone rings. Amazingly, Andrew takes the call, stops working, and gossips with a friend for several minutes. After getting off the phone, Andrew not only fails to apologize but fails to pull his weight in solving the puzzle.
Now let's say the team is awarded $6.00 for its work. In all fairness, how should the proceeds be divided between you and Andrew?
Wait, before you answer that, what if Andrew apologized to you when he got off the phone?
Would that make a difference in how the money was divided?
And what if Andrew apologized only when you reprimanded him by saying, "I can't believe you took a phone call; you really need to apologize"? Would that apology give him more or less of the proceeds?
Would observers--people watching the interaction--agree with you?
This was the subject of an experiment at Cornell University conducted by Jane Risen, a social psychology graduate student, and written up in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
The results are surprising.
After the experiment, the real participants filled out surveys where they indicated what percentage of the money they felt each person should receive. The outside observers awarded Andrew only $1.86 (31%) of the money when he didn't apologize, and they gave him even less--$1.14 (19%)--when he apologized after being reprimanded. That figure jumped up to $2.04 (34%) when Andrew apologized spontaneously.
Andrew's task partners were more generous, giving him an average of $2.16 (36%) of the winnings when he didn't apologize. What's more, they did not distinguish between the heartfelt and coerced apologies, as they gave Andrew the same amount--about $2.40 (40%)--in either condition.
A follow-up experiment may shed some light on why wronged people may be so quick to accept even coerced apologies. In it, 67 participants read vignettes where an employee showed up late to work, getting his colleague into trouble. In half of the stories, the employee apologized to his colleague spontaneously, and in the other half he apologized only after being asked. The participants then imagined themselves accepting or rejecting the apology before rating themselves on a variety of positive and negative traits. After accepting the apology, participants tended to view themselves more positively than after they rejected the apology.
The phenomenon of people being quicker to accept apologies than outside observers is something that Risen has noticed in her everyday life.
"It's often easier for you to forgive someone who has hurt you than...someone who has hurt a friend," says Risen.
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