A key ingredient to a sincere apology is an admission of guilt: exactly what conventional legal wisdom claims a defendant in court would be smart to avoid. However a recent study reveals that a full apology is more likely to result in the quick settlement of lawsuits.
Jennifer Robbennolt, a law professor at the University of Missouri, Columbia, presented some 145 people, ages 21 to 70, with variations on the same hypothetical accident scenario: Subjects had been injured in a collision with a bicyclist and had been offered a settlement that covered only their medical costs.
When the bicyclist didn’t apologize, 52 percent said that they would accept the money. If a full apology was presented, the number jumped to 73 percent. And when the bicyclist offered only a partial apology, in which he did not accept fault for the collision, only 35 percent of subjects accepted the proposed settlement.
Robbennolt argues that the different responses suggest that people find a partial mea culpa insufficient because injured parties want to know that the other person understands what he did wrong. She says plaintiffs want to know that the defendant is less likely to repeat his behavior.
