How Do You Apologise?
Six parts of an apology, and the one most people leave out
Researchers took apologies apart and tested which pieces actually make the other person feel better. There are six, they are not equally important, and the most powerful one is the piece people most often skip - saying plainly that it was your fault. This test shows which parts you reliably include and which you leave out, which is usually the difference between an apology that lands and one that makes things worse.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how you apologise when you were genuinely in the wrong, not about how you smooth things over after a misunderstanding.
What it measures
The six parts an apology can contain: saying you are sorry, explaining what happened, admitting it was your fault, saying you will not do it again, offering to put it right, and asking to be forgiven. The research ranked them, and the ranking is the useful part - two of the six do most of the work.
Based on: The six components of an effective apology (Lewicki, Polin & Lount, 2016)
Possible results
Taking responsibility
Saying it was your fault, without a condition attached.
Offering repair
Doing something about it, not just saying something.
Expressing regret
Saying you are sorry, and meaning it visibly.
Explaining and promising
Saying what happened and that it will not happen again.
Asking forgiveness
Handing the decision to the other person.
Common questions
Does saying more of the six always work better?
On average yes - in both studies, apologies containing more components were rated as more effective. But there is a practical ceiling: past a certain length an apology starts to feel like a performance, and the explanation component in particular curdles into excuse-making when it runs long. If you only have room for two, use responsibility and repair.
What about apologising when I do not think I was wrong?
Then what you have is not an apology and it is better not to dress it as one. You can honestly say that you regret the effect without claiming fault you do not accept - and the research is useful here in reverse, because it tells you that this kind of statement will not produce forgiveness, and explains why. The other person is not being difficult when a sorry-you-feel-that-way does not land. They are correctly detecting that the most important component is missing.
How soon should an apology come?
Sooner is generally better, with one real exception: an apology offered before the other person has finished saying what happened tends to be experienced as a way of closing the conversation rather than having it. If you find that your apologies arrive fast and are not accepted, the problem is often timing rather than content - you are apologising to make it stop.
Sources
- Lewicki, R. J., Polin, B., & Lount, R. B. (2016). An exploration of the structure of effective apologies. Negotiation and Conflict Management Research.
- Fehr, R., Gelfand, M. J., & Nag, M. (2010). The road to forgiveness: A meta-analytic synthesis of its situational and dispositional correlates. Psychological Bulletin.
- Chapman, G., & Thomas, J. (2006). The five languages of apology. Northfield Publishing.
An honest note Two things to be straight about. First, the ranking here comes from studies in which people rated written apologies for offences of a defined size, mostly in a work context - that is a solid method and it is not the same as measuring what repairs a marriage after a betrayal. Treat the order as a good default rather than a law. Second, you may have seen a popular five apology languages framework, from the same author as the five love languages. It is a readable idea and it has the same problem: there is very little empirical work behind the specific five, and what exists does not establish that people have one dominant apology language. The six components used here were arrived at by testing which parts actually change forgiveness, which is a different and better-grounded question.