Mistakes can be positive if you apologise rapidly and authentically. They enable you to show humility, which can strengthen the relationship and ease the conversation.
‘There is no wrong note, it has to do with how you resolve it.’
Thelonious Monk
You have just arrived at the scene of a potential suicide. A man is standing on the ledge of a tall building, threatening to jump. The police brief you on what they know about him, and you make your way up to the roof, where, from a distance at which he won’t feel threatened, you attempt conversation. You begin by trying to make an emotional connection – by showing that you care about him as a person. ‘Hello Ahmed,’ you say. ‘It looks as if you’re having a hard time. I’d like to help if I can.’
At that moment, you realise – perhaps because he tells you, perhaps because you just know – that you’ve made an excruciating mistake. His name isn’t Ahmed. It’s Muhammed.
You have lost control of this situation before you even started. What now?
That was the question Paul Taylor, a professor at Lancaster University in the UK, and one of the world’s foremost scholars of crisis negotiation, put to one of his graduate students, Miriam Oostinga, after realising that nobody had yet studied it. Oostinga was immediately gripped by it. In the tense, emotionally freighted situation of a suicide negotiation, one false note would seem to have the potential to destroy whatever fragile bond of trust the negotiator has established. But errors are inevitable – so how do negotiators cope with them? At Taylor’s suggestion, Oostinga pursued the question for her PhD.
We all make errors of communication, the kind of error that has an instant and palpable effect on the participants, straining relationships. Think of the teacher who jokes about a pupil’s haircut only to realise she has hurt his feelings; the politician who impulsively tweets an opinion he immediately regrets; a salesperson who unintentionally condescends to an upset customer. Even a minor error can have an emotional, even physiological effect, both for the person on the receiving end and on the person making it. Whether and how the maker of the error recovers from it can determine how well the rest of the conversation goes.
Oostinga recruited trained negotiators from the Dutch police and prison services to participate in her study of errors. Some were crisis negotiators, others were interrogators. I asked her what she made of them, as people – did they have similarities? ‘I would say that they were all intrinsically interested in the person they’re talking to,’ she said. ‘When they talked to me, they really gave me the feeling that they were interested in who I was and what I was doing.’ Oostinga started by interviewing the participants, to get a feel for the problems that errors create for them. ‘Nobody is capable of a 100 per cent perfect interaction,’ one of them told her. ‘There is always something that goes wrong.’ The risk of making an error increases as the stakes get higher – when there are more lives at risk – and when negotiators are dealing with aggressive individuals who draw them into a struggle for dominance. Errors might be factual, like getting someone’s name wrong, or mixing up the time and day of an event. Or they might be errors of judgement, like adopting an overly domineering tone, or saying ‘I understand how you feel’ when, as their interlocutor is immediately liable to point out, they patently do not.
What took Oostinga by surprise is that the negotiators were wary of the whole notion of errors. They regarded stray messages as an inevitable side-effect of thinking on their feet. Trying to avoid them would only ensure the conversation was superficial and impersonal. ‘We should be cautious not to become small-talkers who do not say anything wrong,’ one of them remarked. Another said, ‘If we do not make errors, we are not human any more. We become like robots.’ The negotiators felt that ‘error’ was too unambiguously negative a term to describe an event that can have positive consequences, if handled skilfully.
For the next stage of her study, Oostinga simulated crisis scenarios and found ways to trip the negotiators into errors. For instance, they might be told to speak to a person called Steven, who has barricaded himself into a room in a prison and is threatening to kill himself with a knife. The first time that the negotiator uses the name he has been given (negotiators are trained to use names) the perpetrator – played by an actor – would angrily respond, ‘I’m not Steven.’ Other scenarios simulated judgement errors. During a conversation, a suspect would react badly to the negotiator’s tone – for instance, by accusing him of sounding formal and superior, or overly friendly. Oostinga was interested in how the negotiator reacted and in how the conversation developed afterwards.
The errors had some predictable effects: they raised the stress levels of the negotiator and made the conversation more stormy and volatile. But they also had unexpected benefits. The worst enemy of an interrogator or hostage negotiator is not deceit or anger but silence; their primary goal is to keep a conversation, any conversation, alive. Oostinga discovered that errors can be useful in that way. For instance, when describing a scene which the suspect had witnessed, an interviewer would get an important detail wrong (because she had been fed false information by Oostinga). The suspect would respond indignantly: ‘No, it wasn’t like that.’ Then he would go on to describe how things really were, in detail. The conversation would flow, and the interviewer would gain richer information.
Instead of dwelling on a mistake, the professionals would use it to build a closer relationship. They were practiced at making immediate and sincere apologies: ‘You’re right, my mistake’; ‘Yep, that was a stupid thing to say. Can we start again?’ Occasionally they would deflect, blaming the source of their information. But when they felt able, they would accept responsibility and expose a vulnerable side of themselves to the interviewee. Doing that can be productive, the negotiators told Oostinga, if it helps to rebalance an inherently lopsided power relationship. In other words, apologies can correct for the one-down effect – so long as they are believed in.
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Saying sorry is an art few bother to master until it’s too late. Benjamin Ho, an associate professor of economics at Vassar College, studies why some apologies work, while others are regarded as worthless and insincere. It might seem like an odd thing for an economist to focus on, but Ho is a behavioural economist, interested in the costs and benefits of social behaviour. After all, an economy doesn’t run on money; it runs on human relationships (it has taken economists a long time to realise this). The mistakes we make in our social interactions can damage or break those relationships. Apologies are an important way of restoring them.
At the corporate level, apologies have real economic importance. When a company like Volkswagen or Facebook screws up, it needs to apologise effectively if it is to minimise the damage done to its relationships with consumers. A 2004 study, led by Fiona Lee of the University of Michigan, reviewed the corporate annual reports of fourteen companies over a twenty-one-year period, and analysed the way those companies talked about negative events, like poor earnings. Lee and her colleagues found that the companies that owned up to their mistakes in public had higher stock prices a year later than those that tried to bury them.
Inspired by Lee’s work, Ben Ho looked for other ways to establish a link between apologies and economic outcomes. Together with his colleague Elaine Liu, he looked at the way that medical malpractice is handled in the United States. When doctors make mistakes that harm their patients, they can get caught in a bind. On the one hand, presuming they are honest, they want to apologise. On the other, by doing so they expose themselves to the threat of a ruinous legal action. Now, imagine what it is like to be a patient who does not get an apology from a doctor who has made your life, or the life of someone you love, unnecessarily painful. You would feel furious, wouldn’t you? Even if you hadn’t originally intended to sue, you’d probably want to do so now. And that was what was happening: patients were upset, yet doctors didn’t feel able to apologise, which made patients angry enough to sue.
To break this vicious cycle, many American states – thirty-six at the time that Ho and Liu published their paper – have passed laws that make doctors’ apologies inadmissible in court (a bill to that effect was introduced to the Senate in 2005, by Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton). The idea is to create a safe haven for doctors to say sorry, thereby improving their relationship with the patient and making legal action less likely. Since some but not all states passed the law, Ho and Liu found that in states which had passed ‘apology laws’, there was a reduction in claims filed of 16–18 per cent and malpractice cases were settled almost 20 per cent faster. That’s a huge reduction in the number of costly, draining legal disputes, and all because people were able to hear a figure in authority say ‘sorry’. This finding helped Ho put a concrete value on apologies, and it confirmed a theory he was already developing: that for an apology to be effective, it must appear hard to make.
Whether it’s a doctor, builder or politician, we have to place deep trust in an expert for our relationship with them to work. When the expert makes a mistake, the relationship is jeopardised. Whether or not the expert can repair that damage with an apology depends, says Ho, on whether or not the apology is seen to cost them something. Ho draws on game theory, a branch of mathematics influential in economics and biology. In game theory, a ‘costly signal’ is one where an agent communicates in a way that is difficult to fake. The classic example from biology is the male peacock’s tail, the existence of which made Charles Darwin despair because he couldn’t discern the evolutionary logic behind such an elaborate, heavy adornment. The game theorists’ explanation is that the tail’s excessiveness is the point: the male peacock is signalling its extraordinary fitness, like a king who builds an absurdly elaborate palace to display his wealth and power. To signal ‘I’m fit’ or ‘I’m powerful’ in a way that reliably convinces others, the signal must be hard to fake.
Ho thinks the same logic applies to apologies. When we feel that someone has wronged us, we want them to say ‘I’m sorry’, but often the words themselves are not enough for the apology to feel satisfying; we need to feel they’ve been tough to say. While relationship counsellors advise couples to apologise to their partner to help heal a rift, anyone who has been in a relationship will know that you can also apologise too quickly. If you say sorry without it seeming like you had to struggle to do so, the words come across as empty and glib. In fact, we sometimes punish the people we love for apologising to us, pressing them on their reasons for not saying it sooner. The reason we do this is that we want them to pay an emotional price for it. The same logic applies to corporate apologies. The jeering and humiliation that often follow a public apology from a company or politician aren’t proof that the apology was a waste of time, says Ho; the jeering and humiliation are what makes the apology effective.
Ho enumerates a few different ways to make a costly apology. For instance, I’m sorry – here are some flowers. This is the most straightforward version of a costly apology. The cost here is obvious and tangible. The more expensive the flowers, the better. Then there is the ‘commitment apology’: I’m sorry, I’ll never do it again. The cost here is that you are foreclosing or giving up some future option. Of course, if you then go on to do it again, it’s less likely to work the next time. Then there is what I think of as the Englishman’s apology: I’m sorry, I’m an idiot. This is a particularly interesting approach because what you’re trading with is your right to be seen as competent and effective (Ho’s term for it is a ‘status apology’). Finally, there is what Miriam Oostinga refers to as the ‘deflect’ response: I’m sorry, it wasn’t my fault. This is not a very effective way to restore a relationship, precisely because it is not costly to say. But in some circumstances it might still be the best thing to do, for example if your reputation for competence is paramount and you can show it wasn’t your fault.
In 2018, Ho got an unexpected chance to test his theory of apologies against real-world data. He received a call from John List, a professor at the University of Chicago, renowned for running real-world experiments using large datasets. List was calling in his capacity as chief economist at Uber. He wanted Ho to help him quantify the value of an apology to the business. Like any service-based business, Uber sometimes annoys or upsets its customers – a car that doesn’t arrive, the wrong choice of route. List suspected that when a poorly served customer received an apology, they would be more likely to use Uber again in the future. But to convince Uber’s management of that he needed to put a number on the value of apologising.
List and his team had already established that poor service was costly for Uber. Customers who were delivered to their destination 10–15 minutes late spent 5–10 per cent less on future trips. Ho and List wanted to find out if an apology would boost a customer’s spending back up. Along with two fellow economists, Basil Halperin and Ian Muir, they devised an experiment to help Uber figure out what makes an effective apology, and how much one is worth.
The researchers had a big, real-time dataset to play with, garnering information from 1.6 million passengers across America’s major cities. They were able to identify which passengers had recently had a bad trip and ensured that these people received an email containing an apology within the hour. The economists divided the passengers randomly into eight groups and sent different apologetic messages to all but a control group, which got no apology (the control group represented the status quo, since at that point it was not Uber policy to apologise for bad trips). Some received a basic apology with no elaboration. Some received a ‘status apology’, which included the phrase, ‘We know our estimate was off.’ Some received a ‘commitment apology’, which said that Uber would work hard to give the customer arrival times they can count on. All four groups (control, basic apology, status apology and commitment apology) were then split in two, and half of each group received a $5 coupon they could redeem against a future trip. The economists tracked the passengers’ Uber purchases, the number of trips they took and how much they spent for the subsequent eighty-four days.
Ho and his co-authors discovered a few things from their results. First, apologies are not a panacea. They found almost no effect for the basic apology: just saying sorry had very little impact on the number and length of trips people went on to take. Second, the most effective apology was a costly one: giving people a coupon along with an apology actually led to a net increase in their spend with the company, by comparison to the period prior to the bad experience. Third, apologies can be overused. Some of the customers had more than one bad experience and so received multiple apologies. Those customers punished the company more than customers who never received an apology at all.
This echoed something the hostage negotiators interviewed by Miriam Oostinga mentioned. ‘Saying sorry five times in five minutes won’t make for a positive relationship,’ one of them told her. The more apologies you get from someone, the less costly those apologies seem. At some point they start to feel cheap, even insulting.
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Knowing how to apologise is far from simple, because the same apology can have different effects depending on who we are and what we do. Larissa Tiedens, a social psychologist at Stanford University, has studied how the emotions that politicians display in public influence the way that voters perceive them. In one experiment, Tiedens showed respondents one of two video clips of President Clinton, both extracted from the grand jury testimony he gave on the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998 (the fieldwork took place in 1999, when Clinton was still president, and his opponents had begun impeachment proceedings). In one clip, Clinton is visibly angry. He describes his treatment as inappropriate, wrong and unfair, and questions the motives of the investigators. He looks straight at the camera, slashing the air with his hands to emphasise his points. In the other clip, Clinton reflects on his relationship with Lewinsky, and his demeanour is very different. He says the affair was wrong. His head goes down, and he gazes off to the side.
At the time, there was a consensus among media commentators that Clinton needed to show remorse and guilt instead of anger if he wanted to repair his relationship with voters. Tiedens found the opposite: the respondents who viewed the angry clip were more positive about Clinton than those who viewed the remorseful clip. The reason, according to Tiedens, is that ‘anger communicates competence’. Social psychologists have consistently found that people expressing anger are seen as more dominant and competent, even as they seem less friendly, warm and nice. Angry people are more likely to be perceived as high status than sad or remorseful people are. It wasn’t that Clinton’s apologetic style didn’t have a positive effect on how the respondents saw him; they liked him better for it. But the people who saw the angry Clinton respected him more.
This trade-off between respect and warmth makes it hard to judge the right tone to strike when you’re apologising. If you make a status apology (‘I’m sorry, I’m an idiot’) you’re trading away some of your reputation for competence – that is, respect – in exchange for likeability. That can be risky. Whether or not you should do so depends on whether competence or likeability is more important to the relationship in question. Nobody wants to hear a doctor say, ‘The thing is, I’m basically a bit crap at this,’ but a husband or parent should prioritise warmth over authority.
For those who need a measure of both, like hostage negotiators, the question of when to admit error can be a fine judgement call. Some of those Oostinga talked to told her they were reluctant to own up to a mistake unless they had to because of the need to be seen as competent by the person in crisis. For others, an error was an opportunity to equalise an inherently lopsided power relationship. By apologising, the negotiator can show themselves willing to be submissive, which lowers the suspect’s guard and opens up a pathway to intimacy (one of the negotiators told Oostinga that she might even return to an error later in the conversation if she feels its effects lingering: ‘I have a feeling that what I said is still upsetting you’). An error has the potential to bring negotiator and suspect together into a ‘bubble’, where the relationship has time to incubate and deepen. The stakes, the onlookers, the future – the weirdness of the whole situation – all can be forgotten for a while, as the participants pore over what the negotiator got wrong and why. ‘They can bond inside that bubble,’ Oostinga told me.
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Disagreements should be full of mistakes. A disagreement in which the participants plot their every intervention like a chess move and take great care not to say the wrong thing is an arid and passionless affair. It is unlikely to be productive, either; as Oostinga’s negotiators remind us, a conversation without errors is either trivial or robotic or both. Of course, that doesn’t mean you should be happy when you realise you’ve been deaf to the emotions of the other person, when you find yourself talking down to them – or when you get their name wrong. But if this book helps with your disagreeable conversations it won’t be because you have eliminated all the errors you can make; it will be because you are better at recognising those errors and at knowing how to respond to them.
Once you understand how and why disagreements go wrong, the prospect of disagreement’s bumpy, uncomfortable ride seems less intimidating than it might do otherwise. First, because you realise that it’s not just you – that people make similar mistakes all the time, except that usually they don’t recognise them as mistakes. Second, you come to see your mistakes as opportunities in disguise. By correcting your own error – resolving your bum note – you can strengthen your relationship with the other person and make the conversation richer.
An error shakes things up. Or at least it should do. It’s a mini cyclone blowing through the conversation, rearranging the landscape, creating fresh perspectives. It also gives you the opportunity to apologise well, which, as we’ve seen, is much more than a matter of courtesy. An apology should cost you something. I don’t mean that every time you grossly misinterpret what the other person is saying you need to whip out a coupon promising her the next five opinions for free. I mean your acknowledgement of a mistake should be emotionally costly. When you say sorry, it has to mean something other than ‘Let’s move on’; otherwise it’s hard to move on, at least it is for the person who feels offended or badly treated. When you back down from a position, it’s OK to let the other person see how hard it is for you to do so – in fact, it’s better that way.
One of the worst ways to apologise is to say, ‘I’m sorry if . . .’ The ‘if’ immediately renders your apology cheap and insincere, because you’re not admitting to a mistake. If you’re not sure that you’ve made a mistake, best not to apologise at all, until you’re absolutely convinced you have.
If it feels bad, that’s good.