Chicago Booth Review Podcast Why Is Apologizing So Hard?

Shereen Chaudhry: I shouldn't have to do that, because I'm not as to blame as this other party. And when the first apology actually comes in though, what's interesting is that people often report being disarmed and surprised and much more willing to admit what they did wrong.

Hal Weitzman: It's hard to say sorry. And it can be even harder to say sorry without following it up with whatever the other person did wrong. So why are apologies so hard? Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I'm Hal Weitzman, and today I'm talking with Chicago Booth's, Shereen Chaudhry, whose research looks at the strategy of apologizing and blaming. Why do we care so much about others accepting their share of the blame? And when we know that we've done wrong, what's holding us back from apologizing? Shereen Chaudhry, welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Shereen Chaudhry: Thanks for having me.

Hal Weitzman: So glad to have you. And this is a difficult topic, right? And you've done a lot of research on this as you're the expert. One of your papers is on the apologizers dilemma and one is on the blame game. Tell us first about what you mean by the apologizers, what's the dilemma that an apologizer faces?

Shereen Chaudhry: So if you think about a conflict, a simple conflict where it's really clear who is to blame for something, there's a transgressor and a victim, then the decision for the transgressor is just whether they want to admit blame or apologize for the thing that they did wrong. But what we are looking at in the apologizers dilemma are what we find to be actually much more common types of conflicts that involve shared blame. So most situations there's a lot of ambiguity about who did what, how much blame each person deserves. And so in that case, what you actually have are two people who could apologize. Okay, so who should apologize, who should go first, and do they care about that? So it turns out that people do care about that. And actually what we find is that when blame is shared, people treat apologizing first as more of a risky choice.

It feels harder than when blame is one-sided, when it's clear that you're the only one to blame. And so, what could be going on, so let me just kind of jog your intuition. Imagine that we both made a mistake on a report and the project at work failed. If I apologize for my mistake, you could also apologize. Okay, great. But instead you just say, oh, don't worry about it. You have this intuition, that's a much worse case. And most people have this intuition, and the question is why? And what seems to be the reason is that when I apologize and you don't, it feels like I'm shouldering all the blame now. Like somehow I created this reality where it's all my fault. Whereas if you return the apology, it's like we're splitting the blame.

So what seems to be happening is people, when they discuss conflicts, when they reconcile, part of the process is to build a joint narrative about the blame distribution and getting it right. People care about establishing a narrative that they agree with. So if you don't apologize back, it feels like we're establishing a narrative that I really don't agree with. So beforehand, if I don't know whether you're going to apologize, I could end up in one of these two worlds. One, which is great, we both apologize. The other, which is really bad. So maybe I'm so risk averse that I don't want to take that first step. So it creates sort of a dilemma.

Hal Weitzman: Right. It's kind of like the prisoner's dilemma.

Shereen Chaudhry: Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: There's a big risk, right?

Shereen Chaudhry: Yeah. And we're definitely alluding to that in the name. So what's interesting about the prisoner's dilemma, is that's set up so that the payoffs are such that people actually want to take advantage of the other person. So if we're mapping it onto this situation, I want you to apologize and then I don't want to apologize. I want you to be the only one. So I want to defect. And it may be that people think they're in a prisoner's dilemma. They think the other person wants to not apologize after they apologize. That could be. But what we actually find is that in most cases, both people prefer that both apologize. We both want to end up in a world where we both apologize, but if we're skeptical about the other person wanting to do that, then neither of us takes that first step.

Hal Weitzman: And so the difference I guess with the prisoner's dilemma is prisoner's dilemma, we don't get to collude, we don't get to interact. Whereas here we're going to interact.

Shereen Chaudhry: It's sequential.

Hal Weitzman: There's reciprocity. Right?

Shereen Chaudhry: Right, right, right. That's part of it too, yeah.

Hal Weitzman: So I apologize...

Shereen Chaudhry: So theoretically these situations will probably end up in a better state than people anticipate that they will. But if they never take that first step, then they might end up in these suboptimal apology stalemates where neither one makes that first move. And you get these long years of silence. People don't talk to each other.

Hal Weitzman: It sounds like the plot of a rom-com. And then hopefully it's resolved by the end. So, you referred to a narrative, talking of a rom-com, and there's a shared narrative. And yet it's confusing to me, because I feel like often in these sorts of situations it's fraught. And really, the so-called apology doesn't really resolve things. It's still, particularly if I feel that I really apologize and you sort of half-heartedly apologize or you didn't really mean it, or you made me go first. So where does this narrative reside and is not always resolved, is it? It's ongoing?

Shereen Chaudhry: Yeah. So I mapped it out really simply in the opening there, but real conversations are quite complex. And so, most conversations will go on for a long period of time. There's going to be more of a negotiation there. Maybe I partially apologize at first to dip my toe into the water, but not fully. And maybe if you apologize, I'll apologize more later or so forth. So the conversations, like how they actually happen, might be more complex, but I think part of that process is about negotiating what happened. So it could be that you apologize in return, but not for the right thing, then I need to tell you what you did wrong. So there could be a lot of things discussed in these, but we start off, since there's been really no research on this, kind of start off with the simplest case or just assume that both people apologize for the thing that the other person wants them to. Then you'll get this ideal outcome. But in reality, it's probably much more messy than that. And you have conversations where the process is all about negotiating that joint narrative.

Hal Weitzman: Fascinating that there hasn't been research, because as you say, there's a lot of research done on apologies in general, but not on these two-sided.

Shereen Chaudhry: That's great.

Hal Weitzman: Why do you think it's been ignored?

Shereen Chaudhry: I am not sure, but I can say that-

Hal Weitzman: Provided an opportunity for you.

Shereen Chaudhry: ... Yeah, I can say that. What we're discussing here is what we call the informational value of apologizing, the information about the narrative. And a lot of the work on apologizing has focused on the emotional value of apologizing. So its ability to relieve guilt on the part of the transgressor, relieve shame, and to give power back to the victim, to address these emotional needs. To reduce anger, increase forgiveness. And so it's really been kind of a focus on emotions and less on the informational landscape.

Hal Weitzman: All right, and it's important, isn't it? How many apologies are made, one or two, and the order. So tell us about the significance of number and order.

Shereen Chaudhry: So we kind of put it like this, because it's very simple. Number and order, but what essentially that means the number is kind of what I've already talked about. If I apologize and you do, that's two apologies. If I apologize and you don't, that's one. So two apologies means splitting the blame. Whereas one apology means shouldering all of the blame. So people care about they want two when they think it's shared, versus one. Now order, we also find that another feature of conversations that people think feeds into the narrative, is the order of apologizing. So if I go first, it feels like I'm taking on more blame. So even if you apologize in return, I'm the one who went first. It kind of signals that I'm more to blame. And people do think that the more blameworthy party should go first. And so, for instance, we have an experiment where in the lab we create a task that causes pairs of people to fail, and we make it so that one person is clearly more to blame than the other person.

And then they have a chat afterwards. And what we look at is which person is more likely to apologize first and how long the pairs go without apologizing. And what we find is that the more blameworthy person is much more likely to go first and that the person who sees themselves as less blameworthy is more likely to what we call kind of survive or pass each turn, kind of wait, give the other person space to apologize. So there's a little bit of a coordination going on there with order. It is pretty easy to coordinate if you're clearly more to blame than me, and I'll just give you space, let you go first and then I apologize. But what if we both think we're less to blame, right? Now, we're both giving each other space, waiting for the other person to apologize, and then that's probably harder to resolve. Right?

Hal Weitzman: But then if I, in that situation where I think you are the most blameworthy and you think the same of me, if we're both just wait and then one of us, I say, all right, Shereen, I want to say sorry, then is the shared narrative that it's really mostly my fault?

Shereen Chaudhry: It could be. I'm not sure how much that actually impacts how people update. As you said, conversations are very kind of dynamic. So they could discuss through more nuanced communication, like who did what and how much people are actually to blame. But I think just taking that first step, some people feel like I shouldn't have to do that, because I'm not as to blame as this other party. And when the first apology actually comes in though, what's interesting is that people often report being disarmed and surprised and much more willing to admit what they did wrong. So ultimately, I'm not sure it has that impact on the narrative in the dyad, as much as people might think that it does. But it does seem to affect people's willingness to enter that conversation.

Hal Weitzman: Oh, I see. So my perception that I would be considered more blameworthy is more than the actual narrative would reflect?

Shereen Chaudhry: Potentially, potentially.

Hal Weitzman: If you're enjoying this podcast, there's another University of Chicago podcast network show you should check out. It's called Big Brains. Big Brains brings you the stories behind the pivotal scientific breakthroughs and research that are reshaping our world. Change how you see the world and keep up with the latest academic thinking with Big Brains, part of the University of Chicago podcast network.

Okay, Shereen, in the first half we talked about apologies and the apologizers dilemma, but we refer to this in the introduction. We often combine apologizing with blaming, don't we? Blaming apologies. And so, this can infuriate people more than just not saying anything. And one of your experiments found that you talked about two-sided conflicts, that these kind of blaming apologies are more likely in two-sided conflicts. Why is that?

Shereen Chaudhry: Yeah, so I think that's a pretty intuitive finding. If there's nothing to blame the other person for, you're just going to apologize. But what I think is interesting about that is that, so we have for instance, a study where we ask people to recall real conflicts from their lives that are unresolved. And we ask them, imagine approaching the other person and starting a conversation, what would you say? We will get to the most common way people open these conversations, but a significant portion of people engage in these blaming apologies. So I know I overreacted, but you really haven't been doing your portion of the chores in the house. So they'll do both. And what this could be is a nice solution to what we talked about in the first half, which is this risk of going first. If I apologize, and then you don't, it feels like I'm shouldering all the blame. So why don't I just apologize for you or blame you while I apologize. Just set, this is my opening move, I think that we're both to blame. And it seems like a lot of people do that.

Hal Weitzman: In other words, I apologize, but I tell you why you should apologize.

Shereen Chaudhry: Exactly. Exactly. And so, it may be people trying to deal with the risk that they feel that they're facing.

Hal Weitzman: Many of us think that directly blaming someone that we're in dispute with could elicit that apology, and exactly for the reason that you said. Is that what happened? I mean, what does your research say about that?

Shereen Chaudhry: Yeah, so in this same study, the most common way people decide to open up these conversations is to blame the other person without apologizing at all. Just tell them what they did wrong. And so, we thought that was interesting. We just kind of gave them, just asked them to open however they want. Now, they could be trying to get an apology or they could just be trying to vent, make the other person feel bad. So we ran another study similar, but we said, open up the conversation with the goal of trying to get the other person to apologize. And there, even more people purely blamed the other person. So it was like 60% of people just blame the other person, told them what they did wrong. So it seems like people are intuiting that the other person will not apologize unless I tell them what they did wrong.

So that's just what I have to do. So we tested whether this intuition is correct. We had a lab experiment. We put people again in pairs, made them play a game where they failed, they messed up. And then we had half the pairs. We had one person open up the conversation, they sent messages back and forth, but we constrained what messages the first person sent in one condition they could only blame their partner. They could select between two blaming messages. And the other condition, they could only apologize for what they did wrong. And what we find is that in the blaming condition, the responses, so the responses are what we are interested in, were much more likely to be blaming back than apologies. And then in the apology condition, much more likely to be apologies than blame. This is not a terribly unintuitive finding, right?

Blaming begets blaming, apologizing begets apologizing. So it could just be reciprocity. So first of all, what this tells us is that people seem to have the wrong intuition about how to elicit an apology from another person, which is a problem in and of itself. But the other question we're interested in is this really just about reciprocity? I blame you. It's a mean thing to do. So you blame me back just to be mean in return. But what we find is that it's not just that. It's also about correcting the narrative. So if we both made a mistake on a report, like I talked about earlier, I open up and say, hey, I really wish you were more careful in the report and didn't make that mistake. Well, it seems like I don't know that I also made a mistake. It's giving you that kind of implication that in my mind.

So you now feel like you have to tell me, no, no, no, you also did something wrong. And that's what we find people are doing. Blaming makes the recipient feel like the blamer doesn't realize that they deserve blame. So they have to be told in return. So we tested this with real conversations, real dyadic partners, people who have had pre-existing relationships, siblings, roommates, spouses. We had them have a live conflict conversation for five minutes over Zoom. We video recorded it and coded it. And what we did was we had one person think of a conflict they entirely thought the other person was to blame for. And we said, okay, we want you to open up a conversation by telling them what they did wrong. We're trying to get them essentially to blame their partner. So they write it down. Before the conversation we send that to their partner, so the partner kind of knows what conflict they're going to be talking about and tells us how much to blame do you think you are for this?

And then how much to blame do you think your partner thinks you are? And so if you look at the difference, you can get a measure of undeserved blame, how much blame, how much undeserved blame they think they're getting from their partner. And what we predicted was that that would predict return blaming. And so, then they had the conversation and the partner opens up by reading this. And then we have RAs, research assistants, code these videos for whether the partner returned blame and we find they're much more likely to return blame when the more undeserved blame they feel like they're getting from their partner. So it's not just that on average people are going to return blame if the conversation is opened with blame. It really is related to this feeling that they need to correct the narrative.

Hal Weitzman: The narrative seems to be really central to the way that we feel about these interactions.

Shereen Chaudhry: Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: Both the pieces of research that you talked about, so there's a lot of strategic stuff here that you talked about, blaming and apologizing, combining them.

Shereen Chaudhry: Yeah, and I do want to say something about that. So when it comes to strategic, we do use game theory in the paper to kind of think about these interactions, but what we're not saying is that people are sitting there thinking really hard, okay, what is this person going to do? Then what am I going to do. It's kind of a very natural thing to do. In any conversation, we're always thinking strategically. We always calibrate what we're going to say to the other person based on how we think that they're going to react. And we may not even be conscious that we're doing this, because we can do this so well. We have conversations so fast, we're doing it the entire time. So there's a strategic element to all conversations, and it's just not that slow deliberative process that you may think of when you think of strategy. It's more of just this kind of tactical mindset.

Hal Weitzman: Well, Shereen Chaudhry, I'm sorry that we had to bring you back to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, because our producer here actually screwed up the first take of this. But thank you very much for coming back and talking to us about your research on apologizing and blaming.

Shereen Chaudhry: Excellent blaming apology. Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Hal Weitzman: That's it for this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. For more research, analysis, and insights, visit our website at chicagobooth.edu/review. When you're there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research.

This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe, and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I'm Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening.