Conventional wisdom holds that apologies make you look weak. Our last president resolutely refused to apologize for anything for four years. Americans love to mock Canadian and British people for their lily-livered, knee-jerk, obsessive apologizing. (Here, we’ll do it: “Oh gosh, that moose ate your Timbit, sorry!” and “Pip pip cheerio, terribly sorry someone drove a lorry full of chips into the lift! Arsenal! Tottenham Hotspur!”)

Women are constantly informed by people who have not researched apology that they apologize too much. Charts on the Internet suggest multiple things to say in multiple situations instead of “I’m sorry.”

But what if everybody’s wrong?

A 2013 study called “I’m Sorry About the Rain! Superfluous Apologies Demonstrate Empathic Concern and Increase Trust,” published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, found that when you apologize for stuff you’re not responsible for — the weather, the traffic, the fact that Tim Horton’s was out of the maple dip — you create a connection with the person you’re apologizing to. Such “superfluous apologies” display empathy, and empathy has a positive impact on relationships.

When Bill Clinton, once seen as our most empathetic president (though nowadays the 1993 headline in The Onion, “New President Feels Nation’s Pain, Breasts” seems more resonant) said, “I’m sorry about the rain” to an audience awaiting his speech, he communicated that he understood their perspective (dampness!), that he recognized the adversity they were coping with, that he was attuned to and thinking about their feelings and experiences.

The study’s authors (Alison Wood Brooks, a professor at Harvard Business School; Hengchen Dai, now an assistant professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management; and Maurice E. Schweitzer, a professor at the Wharton School of Business) note that previous business-related research showed that negotiators who express regret or guilt tend to be better liked than negotiators who don’t. The authors suspected that people who apologize are better liked “even in the absence of culpability,” so they designed four little studies to prove it.

Study 1: Paid volunteers were recruited to play what the researchers called a “trust game.” The subject would be given $6; they could decide to keep or give to an invisible partner in another room. If they gave the money away, the researchers would triple the sum (to $18) and the hidden partner could choose to either keep all the money or give half of it ($9) back to the subject. But there was a TWIST! The researchers informed the subjects that there was also a computer that could opt to override the partner’s decisions, whatever they were. (In reality, there was no partner and no computer, because researchers are lying liars who lie.) The study found that when the “computer” supposedly overruled the partner and deprived the subject of money, if the partner said, “I’m really sorry the computer changed my choice,” this superfluous apology “increased perceptions of benevolence-based trust.” The subject was more likely to try giving their money to the counterpart again. Not only did the subject trust the counterpart more, but they also rated them more likable.

Study 2: Subjects were asked to imagine that they were waiting for a flight and there was an announcement that the flight was delayed. If someone approached them and said one of three things: “Hi — I’m sorry your flight was delayed; can I borrow your cell phone?” or “Hi – I’m sorry to interrupt; can I borrow your cell phone?” or “Hi – can I borrow your cell phone?” how likely were they to lend the person their phone? Study participants trusted the would-be phone borrower more if the asker offered the first apology (the superfluous apology) than if they gave the second apology (the “traditional apology”) or failed to apologize at all.

Study 3: Participants were asked to imagine they were going to meet a Craigslist seller to buy a used iPod (ahahahahahahaha 2013 study, what even is an iPod) and it was raining. If the seller greeted them with “Hi there, oh, I’m so sorry it’s raining,” the buyer found the seller more trustworthy, more competent and more likeable than a seller who said either “Hi there, oh, it’s raining” or just “Hi there.”

Study 4: The researchers physically sent an actual confederate who didn’t know what the study was about to an actual train station in the actual annoying rain to ask to borrow people’s cell phones. Only 28 percent of the people asked were willing to hand over their phones. Among them, 47% of those who got a superfluous apology (“I’m so sorry about the rain! Can I borrow your cell phone?”) loaned their phone, vs. only 9% of the people who got no superfluous apology (“Can I borrow your cell phone?”).

 

Snarly particularly likes this study because the authors acknowledge that there is research showing gender differences in the way apologies are perceived. Apologizing may have different impacts depending on whether men or women do it! And being likeable because you apologize may be nice, but what if it means you’re also perceived as less powerful? What if apologizing, for women, means damaging your perceived power, control, and competence, as other studies have noted? The researchers looked at gender in their four studies, and in this case, they explicitly note, there were no gender differences in how superfluous apologies were perceived. (We’d observe that in this paper, the apologizer apologizes only once per experiment. Repeated, frequent apologies have a different impact. More research is needed, as ever.)

Look, the power of a superfluous apology is that it says, “I see you.” This is why we say, “Sorry for your loss,” even if we didn’t kill the person’s grandmother. This is why, while writing this post, when Snarly received a text from her child reporting that they felt sick and puked on the camp bus, Snarly reflexively replied, “I’m so sorry” even though she didn’t make the child eat all those cherries.

Making the effort to put ourselves in another person’s place, taking time to look at the world as the other person sees it, striving to be kind and generous rather than brusque or entitled…this is how we build the world we want to live in. Good apologies — and as we see here, sometimes even superfluous apologies — are a small step toward creating this world.

Life is just a bowl of cherries. Enjoy in moderation.