Apology Not Accepted

During President Obama's recent visit to Israel he sat down with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and the two men phoned Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Netanyahu proceeded to apologize for Israel's actions three years earlier when an attempt to stop a Palestinian aid flotilla lead to the deaths of Turkish citizens. Erdogan accepted the apology, and both men agreed to dispatch ambassadors and resume normal diplomatic relations. Just like that, a simple "I'm sorry" had a non-zero impact on the prospect of a more peaceful Middle East.

Even if you don't happen to be a world leader, making amends is important for maintaining the relationships that support civilized society. Forgiveness builds trust, strengthens important norms, and mitigates the desire for socially destructive revenge. The world would be a better place if there was a 20% increase in apologies and apology acceptances.

Though humans tend to be fairly forgiving, we sometimes encounter circumstances that make reconciliation difficult. For example, it's often harder to forgive somebody who harms your friend rather than you. In one experiment, participants who imagined a friend's significant other revealed a secret about the friend felt less forgiving than participants who imagined their own significant other revealed a secret about them. This "third-party forgiveness effect" arises because when a third-party is harmed people tend think there is more intent to harm and that the wrongdoer bears more responsibility. It seems that being removed from the situation leads people to make biased attributions that discount contextual factors and emphasize personal factors.

A person's views about the nature of personality can also impact the propensity to forgive. In general, it's helpful to believe that personal characteristics (e.g.. intelligence, weight, etc.) can change, and specifically believing personality can change has been shown to decrease aggressive desires in high school students. However, when it comes to apologies, believing that personalities are malleable rather than fixed makes you less likely to forgive. Once again, it's attributions of intent that drive forgiveness. When you believe personality can't change, it's hard to blame an action on a person's faulty but fixed personality. After all, that's just the way they are. But when you believe personality can change, it means the person could have worked to correct their flaws, and that makes them more responsible for their actions.

The takeaway is that the standard quid-pro-quo of apologies and forgiveness is not always as easy as it seems. (Research also shows that people are least likely to offer apologies in situations where apologies are most desired.) Understanding that a situation may not be ripe for making amends can alert you to take extra steps geared toward stoking forgivenees. For example, you could show extra remorse to somebody you've wronged in a way that makes them unlikely to forgive, or if you're on the other side of things you might enage in more reflection or metacognitive thought in an effort to see through your stubbornness. None of this is to say that you should be throwing out pardons willy nilly, but given the importance of reconciliation these small steps could ultimately have a large impact. When it comes to forgiveness, the more the merrier.

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