353. How to Optimize Your Apology

You said, “I’m sorry,” but somehow you haven’t been forgiven. Why? Because you’re doing it wrong! A report from the front lines of apology science.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:42Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:27Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:54Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  John List is an economist at the University of Chicago.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  I go out and run field experiments in the real world.

• 2:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  You've probably heard List on our show before. Here are some of the questions he's tried to answer using field experiments.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Why do people discriminate against one another? Why do women earn less pay than men in labor markets? How do we convince people to work harder on the job? How do we convince people to pay their taxes on time?

• 3:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so the following story took place in early 2017.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  So picture this: I get in an Uber car to go give a keynote panel address at the American Economic Association meetings.

• 3:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  The AEA meetings were in Chicago that year. Very convenient for John List. All he's got to do is get from his house to the hotel where he's giving his keynote.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  So I get in the back of the car, and it says I'm going to be there in 27 minutes. So I go into my own land of working on my slides, because of course, I'm doing things at the last minute. So I lose track of time. I look back up about 25 minutes later, and I'm back in front of my house.

• 3:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  And I say, oh, my God, what happened? The driver said, I got really confused, and the GPS switched. And we turned around, and I thought that you changed the destination. So I went back. So I told her, immediately turn around, go back. I missed part of my panel.

• 4:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  If John List was just your average, run-of-the-mill Uber rider, the story might have ended there. But he wasn't. Like a lot of academic economists, John List does some moonlighting. At the time, he held a rather interesting position.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  I'm the chief economist at Uber.

• 4:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that night?

• 4:24Speaker 01

  And that night, I gave Travis Kalanick, who was the CEO of Uber and co-founder of Uber, a phone call.

• 4:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what did List say?

• 4:36Speaker 01

  So what I told Travis was, you know what is the worst part about getting a bad trip? Is I never received an apology.

• 4:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  For those of you who think that economists are immune to human emotion, that they don't have feelings that can be hurt.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  And I said, Travis, that's a real problem.

• 4:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, you're not necessarily wrong.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  And he said, look, if you think it's a problem, go ahead and solve it.

• 5:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  It wasn't that John List's feelings were hurt by Uber's non-apology. He actually saw it as a research opportunity.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  So I went back to my team at Uber, and I said, let's calculate what an experience like mine actually does to future ridership.

• 5:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  In other words, what are the economics of an apology or a non-apology? Today on Freakonomics Radio, we are inundated these days with apologies. I want to apologize to everybody for the wrong that I've done.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  I apologize first, and most importantly, to my family.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  I did take a banned substance. And, you know, for that, I'm very sorry. And we are so sorry and embarrassed.

• 5:47Speaker 04

  And that was a big mistake. And it was my mistake. And I'm sorry.

• 5:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  But what is an apology, anyway? An apology is basically like signing a contract. When is an apology not an apology?

• 5:59Speaker 05

  We don't care, Roseanne Barr, if you were on Ambien.

• 6:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what we all really want to know, do they work?

• 6:05Speaker 01

  You really have to squint hard

• 6:10Speaker 01

  to make the case that apologies by themselves work.

• 6:31Speaker 06

  From Stitcher and Dubner Productions, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 6:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Considering that Uber facilitates roughly 15 million rides a day, it shouldn't be surprising that some of them will be bad, like John List's ride was bad. So List and his economics team at Uber began to think, what would happen if Uber apologized in these cases? And what if these apologies could be wrapped in an experiment that would test the efficacy of apologies generally?

• 7:15Speaker 01

  And where we started was we have a chance here to give the scientific community the first large-scale field experiment that goes after deepening our understanding of the economics of apologies.

• 7:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  List is perhaps the most prominent economist in the realm of field experiments. He argues they're much better than lab experiments in answering economic questions.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  I think field experiments right now are alongside the most important approaches methodologically that we have to examine data.

• 7:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that he knew how to do, but concerning apologies per se...

• 7:55Speaker 01

  So I said, well, I know nothing about the economics of apologies or how we should be doing things. So what I did is I reached out to an academic expert named Ben Ho.

• 8:08Speaker 07

  Right. My name is Ben Ho. I'm an associate professor of economics at Vassar College.

• 8:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ho got interested in apologies during grad school.

• 8:17Speaker 07

  I was sort of fumbling around for a new idea, a question no one's really asked before. And my roommate had a friend that kept on showing up late for their tennis dates. She'd apologize profusely. He would forgive her. And at some point, he got fed up, right? And he basically said, you know... And apologies are just empty words. You know, why do we even bother with them? And I was inspired because at the time, one of the big debates in game theory is the relationship between sort of empty words, the formal term for this in economics is cheap talk, and sort of more costly ways to signal something.

• 8:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Why is this idea interesting to an economist?

• 8:47Speaker 07

  I think the economy is really based on relationships and relationships are based on trust. And trust depends on knowing who is trustworthy that you want to interact with over and over again. Who was the most trustworthy person that I should be meeting for tennis dates or that I should have as an employee or whose restaurant I should go to? And so when I'm trying to assess somebody's trustworthiness, you know, different information signals come in that gets me to reevaluate how trustworthy they are. If they do a good job at showing up on time, then they're more trustworthy. If they show up late, they're less trustworthy. And an apology is something that sort of helps restore my trust in them by sort of signaling their trustworthiness to me.

• 9:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  In other words, an apology may represent something more concrete than mere guilt or embarrassment.

• 9:30Speaker 07

  And that's how I started formulating the model of apologies.

• 9:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ho's apology model makes a variety of predictions. For instance, apologies are more likely in longer relationships.

• 9:41Speaker 07

  The idea is that you could think of an apology as an investment, that basically if I'm never going to see this person again, then why should I go out of the way to restore this relationship? But if this is the beginning of a long relationship, then it does make sense for me to bring the relationship back into line.

• 9:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  The most important prediction of Ho's model has to do with efficacy.

• 9:58Speaker 07

  The model argues that for an apology to be effective, it has to be costly.

• 10:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  When economists like Ho talk about cost, they don't mean it strictly in the financial sense, although that is important.

• 10:13Speaker 07

  People like money.

• 10:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  But there are other types of cost you can incur. Consider what happens when you make what Ho calls a status apology.

• 10:21Speaker 07

  These are the ones where you basically admit your own incompetence and you beg for forgiveness by sort of making yourself look dumb.

• 10:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  For instance, "I'm sorry. What I did was completely idiotic." If done sincerely, Ho says, this kind of apology can carry a real cost to your reputation. Another form of apology, a commitment apology, can be even more powerful.

• 10:44Speaker 07

  They're a commitment to do better in the future. And so it's basically saying, yes, you know, I screwed up, but I recognize, you know, what I did was wrong. And in the future, you could hold me to a higher standard.

• 10:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  But Ho's model shows that a commitment apology can also backfire. The logic here is pretty simple. If you promise to improve and then don't, the apology is worth less than zero. You can see why Ben Ho was the person that John List thought of as an apology expert.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  So I think what Ben did is he formalized in a very natural way, in a very common sense way, how we should think about apologies.

• 11:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  But Ho's apology model was only a model. How would it stand up to empirical scrutiny? He did some lab experiments with undergraduates and they produced some evidence backing the model. But he, like List, had come to be skeptical of many lab experiments.

• 11:39Speaker 07

  I think they're a good start for helping us identify phenomenon. But I think what we really care about is what happens in the real world.

• 11:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  So he went looking for some real world evidence about apologies. One idea came from his wife, who was then his girlfriend and studying to be a doctor.

• 11:54Speaker 07

  And something that doctors worry about a lot is whether they should apologize after a mistake was made. And the reason they worry is that, you know, they're scared of lawsuits.

• 12:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  So a doctor's apology might be used against them in a malpractice suit. At the same time, there was evidence showing that a doctor was less likely to get sued if they did apologize.

• 12:14Speaker 07

  So people have identified what they call a vicious cycle, where doctors are afraid to apologize because they're scared of getting sued. But the patient, you know, the only reason they sue is perhaps because they never got an apology. So to sort of combat this, a lot of states started passing what are called I'm sorry laws. These are laws that basically say that if a doctor apologizes to a patient, that apology can't be used in court against them.

• 12:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ho was curious to find out what happened to malpractice claims once doctors could apologize without fear of reprisal. He and the economist Elaine Liu tried to measure just how much an apology was worth.

• 12:51Speaker 07

  We found shockingly really big effects. We found that states that passed this law saw the speed of settlements increase by around 20%. We saw that for sort of moderate injuries, the final size of the settlements decreased by around $20,000. For sort of major injuries, which included quadriplegia and death, the size of the final settlements decreased by around $50,000 or $60,000.

• 13:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  This was compelling, but Ho had to admit the limits of the malpractice data.

• 13:18Speaker 07

  That's not ideal, right? Because that wasn't an experiment. You know, these were sort of very large scale correlations at the state level. There could be a lot of confounding factors that we tried to control for, but maybe we didn't do a good job.

• 13:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  For instance, maybe the I'm sorry laws influenced how doctors or patients behaved for different reasons. Maybe they led to other hospital reforms or changed the way malpractice lawyers advised their clients.

• 13:42Speaker 07

  And so you want a place with fine-grained data and ideally experimental data. And I've been looking for that for years. So I've like sort of started all these plans to run experiments on Facebook or Twitter, where we get to sort of do apologies at scale. And I just never had the resources to do that. And so just, you know, out of the blue, like last year, I got this phone call from John List. How are you doing, my friend? And you see his name show up on your phone and you're sort of like, you know, because like John List is like one of the founders of modern experimental economics. And so, you know, to get a call the blue was sort of an amazing experience. And he basically just said,

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Ben, here's the problem that we have. What do we know scientifically? And what types of solutions can we propose and test using a field experiment?

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Using Uber's app.

• 14:32Speaker 07

  And so they started conceiving of this project for apologies. And, you know, Ben Ho is the apology guy. And so that's how I got involved.

• 14:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ho and List, along with two more economists, Basil Halpern and Ian Muir, began to devise an experiment that would A, test the theoretical predictions of Ho's model, and B, figure out more generally whether and how a company should apologize to its customers.

• 14:59Speaker 07

  Yeah, the main goal for the experiment was to understand how best to repair relationships with customers.

• 15:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  John List had already looked at how costly a bad trip was for Uber.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  We did a huge analysis of all of those trips in the 5% worst kind of trips. And these tend to be trips where you're delivered between 10 and 15 minutes late. And those types of trips end up costing us 5% to 10% in terms of revenues lost.

• 15:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Meaning, a customer who got a really bad trip would spend 5% to 10% less on future Uber trips.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 15:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, in this new study, List and Ho wanted to see if perhaps an apology could lower that.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  So what we did is we looked across all of the major markets in the US, across several cities.

• 15:56Speaker 07

  And so over the months of the study, we'd basically accumulated 1.6 million riders. Like, to be able to run an experiment that involved 1.6 million people was sort of mind blowing.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  And when a person had a bad trip, what we did is, within an hour after their bad trip, we sent them an email, which included an apology and, in some cases, a promotion.

• 16:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mm hmm. Promotion meaning a coupon.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  Exactly right. So we give people a $5 coupon, which is good for a future trip.

• 16:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  And so one and a half million riders and you identify the really bad trips. And then you send apologies, but I'm guessing there's a variety of different treatment groups, treatment and control groups in here. Yes. Can you break that down for us?

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. So it sort of works as follows. You, you get a bad trip. And after you receive that bad trip, we randomly put you in one of eight different groups. So given that we have one and a half million people, we're placing about 200,000 people in each of these eight different groups. And the eight different groups could be thought about as follows. You have a control group, which has a bad trip. And they never receive any word from Uber. That's sort of my experience. When I got a bad trip, Uber never contacted me. That's sort of the status quo.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  And for the other groups, we just tested different kinds of apologies. Something we call the basic apology was an email that said, oh no, your trip took longer than we estimated. We juxtapose that against what we call a status apology, which goes as follows. We know our estimate was off. The third kind of apology is what we call a commitment apology. And that goes along the lines of we're working hard to give you arrival times that you can count on. We cross all of those four groups, the no apology group and the three basic apology groups,

• 18:14Speaker 01

  with a customer promotion that says, we're giving you a $5 coupon for a future trip.

• 18:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gotcha. So how does it work though? This is just a small detail, but I'm curious. How does it work for the, for the control group? That in the first of the four treatments, they're not hearing from Uber at all. But then in the control group of the ones who are getting the $5 coupon, they must be getting some kind of message there. It's not just, or is it just $5 credit shows up in their account and they barely even know it?

• 18:45Speaker 01

  No, you're exactly right. That's a good point. So there's just a, a statement that you are receiving a $5 promotional coupon. Now, this is not unusual because that is what we do all the time. We, we send passengers coupons. Now,

• 19:03Speaker 01

  What's important, though, is the timing of that. So these particular $5 coupons were coming within an hour of the bad trip. So now we can explore how a $5 coupon right after a bad trip compares to a generic $5 coupon.

• 19:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  And then how far out from the bad ride do you measure each customer to see what their behavior looked like? In other words, whether they stopped using Uber, started using it less after a bad trip?

• 19:35Speaker 01

  So after we send them the email, what we do is we track their consumption, purchases, a number of trips, and how much they spend for 84 days on the Uber platform.

• 19:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so I think we understand the eight different groups. We understand how the communication would work. And then you're going to measure the behavior of the people and you can identify which treatment group they were in. Is there anything else we need to know about the experiment before you tell us the findings?

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there's one more twist of the experiment. Beyond the eight treatment cells that we had that I would call the primary experiment, we also have, in the real world, what happens is after you get a bad trip, it's possible that you get another bad trip, you know, a week or two later. So what we did is we complemented the primary treatments with a set of secondary treatments where if you receive two bad trips or three bad trips, we send an additional apology or an additional two apologies in the case of the third bad trip. Because what we're interested in is if you have repeat apologies, can that actually backfire?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Or perhaps it's actually better for the firm to have multiple apologies?

• 21:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so give me then a quick summary of the findings.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  So I think that the first data pattern that jumps out of our experiment is that you really have to squint hard to make the case that apologies by themselves work. It's very difficult to find consistent and significant impacts of the apology alone on future spending or the number of trips that consumers take.

• 21:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Does that suggest then that anyone who apologizes, individual or corporation or government or whatever, that just an apology alone in a kind of modal setting is not worth the time? Or do you think there's still value to it?

• 21:48Speaker 01

  I still think there's going to be value to it, but I think that what's important here is that the firm needs to make sure that when they apologize, they take proper discretion in that the consumer understands that there was a true cost to that apology. I think the standard apology treatments that we had did not have a good element of, you know what? That was costly for Uber to do it.

• 22:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  What's an example of a cost other than a cost paid back to the customer, him or herself? In other words, yes, you can give $5 credit to that customer, but is there a kind of cost? Would it be a charitable donation? What can you show in an email that is a cost to you?

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think it could take many forms. As you mentioned, it could be a real dollar outlay to the person. It could be a real dollar outlay to a charitable organization. It could be something that you signal to others in embarrassing moment. Now, in many cases, if it's just an email, that's a very private thing. But when we talk about apologies more generally, if you show some empathy and some embarrassment to a broad reach of people, it might not be a true dollar cost, but it's a true reputational cost.

• 23:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so the first big finding is that apologies in and of themselves are not a panacea. What's the second big finding?

• 23:14Speaker 01

  I think the second big finding is that if you use a $5 coupon or cold hard cash,

• 23:23Speaker 01

  For a future trip, that actually can work to reverse some of the bad effects of a bad trip. Now, to put it in perspective, a bad trip, the person spends five to 10% less on future trips over, say, an 84-day period. If you give them a $5 coupon, I can get an increase of 2% in net spending.

• 23:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  And how diminishing are those returns? In other words, what if you gave $20 and $100?

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Great question. The only thing that we experimented on was a $5 coupon.

• 23:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  But I'm just curious. So, you know, I'll ask you to speculate now a little bit on a couple of fronts. Does your research have anything useful to teach if I'm not a multi-billion-dollar rideshare company? I mean, can this sort of finding translate even into the personal sphere? I guess what I'm really asking is, John, since you guys write that, you know, money speaks louder than words, right? An apology with a $5 coupon does better than an apology without. So does this mean, basically, that if I've angered someone in my family, I should just, like, slip a C-note under the pillow? Is that the way to go?

• 24:35Speaker 01

  And I could see you doing that, Stephen. That's wonderful. No, I think the four broader lessons that I would take is, you know, first of all, apologies are not a panacea. But secondly, they'll be most likely to have an impact when they are costly to the apologizer and the apologizee understands that there's a cost. I think that's kind of the second big lesson. I think the third lesson is that you should use them with proper discretion. And what I mean by that is, don't overuse them.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Because the kind of the next major result that we find in our data is that if you overuse apologies, they can actually backfire and they can be worse for the firm rather than better.

• 25:29Speaker 07

  So the idea here is that an apology is basically like signing a contract. When I apologize, I'm basically accepting being held to a higher standard relative to somebody that did not apologize. And we saw that by looking at what happened to people that received multiple apologies. Right? So for some subset of these people, their ride was late, you know, two times or three times, they received apologies over and over again. And what we found is that they actually punished the company more than customers that never got an apology at all.

• 26:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  There's an interesting wrinkle to the Uber apology study. As it was underway, the company's controversial founder and CEO, Travis Kalanick, was being ousted by the board.

• 26:11Speaker 08

  I'm Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's new CEO. It's time to move in a new direction.

• 26:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Uber, the company quite famously has found itself apologizing for a lot of stuff over the past few years, mostly male executives behaving badly, but also what sometimes characterizes sort of thuggish corporate behavior, strong-arming. And they've issued a variety of corporate apologies. Have you examined their efficacy? And I'm curious whether this kind of micro apology research has trickled up the corporate ladder into the macro apologies that the firm has done.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think it's a great question. When you when you look at results like what we have, I think perhaps what we were finding is a general feature.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Of the way people think about apologies and those same sorts of insights in can make their way up because right now Uber is undergoing a reputational campaign. You see the new CEO Dara is out, you know, saying Uber has changed and we're a new company and we apologize for, for all of our misbehaviors in the past. I think what we learned-

• 27:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is it working?

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Well, the thing is, is we don't have the counterfactual. So we don't know what the world would have looked like absent Dara going out and apologizing. We didn't do that as a way to test this macro type of approach. You know, you could have though. You could have had Dara randomly doing spots, radio spots and television spots in different cities.

• 27:59Speaker 08

  You've got my word that we're charting an even better road for Uber and for those that rely on us every day.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, Uber didn't do that. So it's impossible for anyone to unequivocally say this type of apology works and this type doesn't at that macro level.

• 28:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up after the break, how to optimize your apology from a scholar who studied 12 years' worth of apologies.

• 28:35Speaker 05

  It turned out for us that what you say first and what you say last goes a long way in whether or not people forgive you.

• 28:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  And a video meant to be funny is in fact offensive and goes viral.

• 28:49Speaker 09

  He was like, "Bro, your face is in the news." I'm like, "What are you talking about?"

• 28:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  What happens next is a masterclass in apologizing.

• 28:58Speaker 10

  I mean, I wish I could be so, if I could take back things that I did in such a humble way.

• 29:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  And if you enjoy Freakonomics Radio, feel free to spread the word, maybe leave a nice rating or review on your podcast app. You can find our most recent three months' worth of episodes on any app. For the full archive, visit Freakonomics.com or Stitcher. We will be right back.

• 29:24Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 30:09Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 30:50Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 31:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  The economist John List, by running a huge field experiment with Uber riders, learned a few things about apologies.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  So I would say, an apology to have impact needs to be costly and understood by the person who receives the apology that it's costly. I think it needs to occur directly after the event happened. I think you cannot overuse them, because then it is harder to entertain or show that the apology was costly.

• 32:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that's interesting, maybe useful, but it also represents a particular situation. When a company has disappointed its customer and makes what is essentially a private apology by email or text, what's known about public apologies and their efficacy? It'd be nice to find someone who's studied that, too, don't you think?

• 32:38Speaker 05

  Okay. My name is Karen Cirullo.

• 32:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Cirullo is on the faculty of Rutgers University.

• 32:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm a cultural sociologist, and one of my interests involves studying media messages. How does the content and the formatting of these messages influence their effectiveness?

• 32:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Cirullo's interest in apologies grew out of her research on how the media reports acts of violence.

• 33:01Speaker 05

  I was exploring how the crafting of a message can make audiences view violence as either heinous or justified. And public apologies presented a kind of natural outgrowth of that work. After all, apologies are meant to persuade people in making judgments about what the offender did.

• 33:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  She partnered with another sociologist, Janet Ruwan.

• 33:23Speaker 05

  We wanted to get a broad swath of apologies, so we analyzed apologies that occurred between October of 2000 and October of 2012.

• 33:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  They included only apologies where the full text was available, so that they could be analyzed? And furthermore...

• 33:41Speaker 05

  We wanted apologies that were highly visible, things that were covered by five or more distinct media outlets, so that we could look at people's reactions to them and see whether the apologies were effective or not. So following those rules, we gathered a sample of 183 apologies.

• 33:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  So these were apologies by definition made by prominent people or organizations. For instance.

• 34:05Speaker 05

  Chris Brown.

• 34:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  I felt it was time that you heard directly from me that I am sorry.

• 34:09Speaker 05

  The GOP official Marilyn Davenport. I humbly apologize. Marion Jones, the Olympic athlete.

• 34:16Speaker 11

  I want to ask for your forgiveness for my actions.

• 34:20Speaker 05

  Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister of Australia.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  We say sorry.

• 34:24Speaker 05

  We looked at some from companies too, CBS, Apple.

• 34:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Cirulo and Ruwan then analyzed the format and content of these apologies.

• 34:34Speaker 05

  Now, by content, I mean what was mentioned, the victim, the offender, the act, what motivated the act, the context, the presence of remorse, or some sort of offer for restitution. And by formatting, I mean, how did people order those things in their apology? What did they cover first, second, et cetera? Because we believe those elements would make a real difference in the apology's reception.

• 35:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  They categorized each apology using a standard typology tool that covers five strategies: denial, evasion, reduction, corrective action, and mortification. They also identified seven sequencing formats. Some apologies, for instance, start out by focusing on the offender, some on the victim, others on the context. Once they'd categorized each apology, the researchers then measured their seeming effectiveness.

• 35:28Speaker 05

  Every apology that we analyzed actually had poll data attached to it because the events were significant and visible enough that polls were done gauging people's reactions.

• 35:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Then they analyzed the data, controlling as best as they could for factors like age, gender, race, and so on.

• 35:48Speaker 05

  We wanted to make sure that it just wasn't about who you were or who your victims were, but that there was something about the message you delivered, the apology itself, that was at work here.

• 35:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so what'd they learn?

• 36:01Speaker 05

  It turned out that what you say first and what you say last goes a long way in whether or not people forgive you.

• 36:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  The beginning of an apology, Cerulo believes, is extra important because...

• 36:14Speaker 05

  Well, I think the first thing you say is priming the audience. That is, it's pointing them, cognitively speaking, in a certain direction. And it's framing the action in a certain way.

• 36:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that's why the most successful apologies in her research begin by focusing on the victim or apologizee, not the apologizer.

• 36:35Speaker 05

  Where you would start out by talking about your victim and talk very little about yourself or your own justifications and end your apology by talking about how sorry you were and, if possible, stating that you'd make some restitution. Those types of apologies were the most effective.

• 36:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Cerulo wasn't surprised that successful apologies start with the victim and end with a sense of remorse.

• 37:02Speaker 05

  Because in some ways, those findings mirrored research I had done on violent messages, that if you want someone to feel that an act of violence is heinous rather than justifiable, you've got to bring them into the story via the victim.

• 37:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  But what did surprise her?

• 37:20Speaker 05

  Overall, we were surprised at how few people could make an effective apology. We really thought, given the kinds of people we were dealing with, that there would be agents and handlers and staff that would help in this regard. But really, less than a third of the apologies that we looked at were effective with the public. One of the least effective types of apologies are what we call offender-driven. And these start out by the person talking about themselves and then giving all sorts of information about the context and the motivation of their apologies. That was one of the most common types of apologies. It was almost always ineffective.

• 38:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  In other words, the kind of apology where you say, "I'm sorry, but what you mean is, I'm sorry I got caught doing the thing I did, and now I'm really sorry I have to embarrass myself by issuing this apology."

• 38:13Speaker 12

  What occurred was unintentional, completely regrettable, and I apologize if you guys are offended.

• 38:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what is Cerulo's general advice on how to give a successful apology?

• 38:29Speaker 05

  Number one, don't wait. Forget your ego, forget the advice of your handlers. Unless you're involved in a legal situation where you're advised not to speak, you should make an apology right away. Second, don't apologize for what people thought. In other words, you know, we've often heard people say, "I'm sorry that people misunderstood me. I'm sorry that people misinterpreted or misread my actions." Apologize for what you did, not for what other people might have thought about it. Third, don't give context. We don't care, Roseanne Barr, if you were on Ambien. We don't care, as in the case of Samantha Bee, if you wanted to reclaim the C-word. We don't

• 39:12Speaker 05

  care, as in the case of Elon Musk, if you were mad at someone when you made an unfortunate comment. The why of what you did is less important to people than your regret and your remorse. And finally, there's really a successful formula that you need to use. Identify your victim right up front, then express remorse, and if it's possible, make restitution. That's it. That's really what people want to hear in an apology.

• 39:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Cerulo notes that one of the most famous apologies in recent memory, Bill Clinton's apology for his White House sexcapades with Monica Lewinsky, that started out as ineffective.

• 39:54Speaker 05

  The issue with the Bill Clinton apology is that, number one, it took so long for it to be made, and then it was made multiple times. What we notice when we look at Bill Clinton's apologies is that they got better as he continued doing it. So, for example, the televised apology spent a little bit too much time talking about how people were victimizing him and how a lot of the accusations made against him were political in nature.

• 40:21Speaker 13

  It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction. Into prying into private lives and get on with our national life.

• 40:31Speaker 05

  By the time we got to the apologies that he was making at the National Prayer Service, for example, a lot of that material dropped out and he began conforming more strictly to what we suggest is the most effective formula, talking about his victims and talking about true remorse and wanting to change his behavior.

• 40:52Speaker 13

  It is important to me that everybody who has been hurt know that the sorrow I feel is genuine.

• 41:00Speaker 07

  One of my favorite psychological experiments made these two videos of Bill Clinton.

• 41:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  That again is the apology economist Ben Ho.

• 41:08Speaker 07

  And in one video, he looks really angry about the Monica Lewinsky thing. And in another case, Bill Clinton looks apologetic for Monica Lewinsky. The people that saw apologetic Clinton, the apology worked. They liked him more. But the thing is that people that saw angry Clinton respected him more, right? There's this trade off between being liked and being respected. And so sort of the other sort of major cost on apology is it can make you look incompetent.

• 41:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, that's an interesting wrinkle. Since prominent people are inherently quite competent, or at least considered to be, there may be a built in disincentive to apologize. I asked John List if that's why a certain uber prominent person of the moment often doesn't apologize.

• 41:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  The current president of the United States, President Trump, has quite famously made a policy of not apologizing even when he's made a simple verifiable mistake or misstatement. And, and I would argue, he's hardly the only person in the world who takes this, you know, kind of zero tolerance for apology strategy. I'm curious what you think of that as a general strategy, because what you've been telling us is that apologies done poorly can backfire. And I'm guessing they can signal weakness and so on. So what do you think from, I guess, a game theoretical perspective? Should more of us think about just like never apologizing for anything?

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Well, so I think first of all, some of us, it gives us satisfaction to show remorse and show that that we care about the other person. So a lot of times when you apologize, it, it might be in part for selfish reasons. You just want to get it off your chest and do the right thing. Now, You bring up something interesting with politicians that when I worked in the White House in the Bush II administration, you know, we did some things back then that I thought the White House would apologize for. And I worked at that time with a number of senators when we talked about new environmental legislation. And when things leaked, I thought

• 43:19Speaker 01

  that there would be an apology. And what puzzled me was an apology never actually came. And you're exactly right. Trump is doing the exact same thing. Trump apologizes for nothing, even though it's clear that in some cases, he's wrong. Now, what I chalked that up to back then is if you show weakness as a politician, and you go on record making a mistake, guess what? Next November comes very soon, and that's on every billboard that you made this dumb mistake, you're an idiot, you're a bad person. So I think in the political world,

• 44:03Speaker 01

  there's actually a really good game theoretic reason why we have really a very scant number of apologies. But I think it's actually for a very rational purpose.

• 44:23Speaker 09

  If you're gonna apologize, go with the heart, like really mean it. Like, people can tell when you faking it and when you're not. So clearly, at the end of the day, just be real.

• 44:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Quayshon Stewart.

• 44:32Speaker 09

  I'm from Westchester, Yonkers, New York.

• 44:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Stewart is 25. He's an aspiring comedian who, earlier this year, was working for a delivery company in Brooklyn. On the street, he saw a young Orthodox Jewish boy, a Hasidic kid with his hair cut with the long side curls known as paeus. And the kid was crying. Stewart pulled out his phone and started recording.

• 44:55Speaker 09

  I'd be crying if I looked like that, too, bro. That's [bleep] up what they'd be doing to ya. Well, basically, it was just a video of me joking on a Hasidic Jew's kid, his haircut, because you know how their haircut is different from most people's.

• 45:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Stewart uploaded his video to Facebook with a post that said, "Had to really let my son know how I felt about the whole Jewish haircut. Pray for the little homie." He didn't think too much about it and he went back to his delivery work.

• 45:23Speaker 09

  I was doing two shifts at that job, so I would work all day. I had finished my first shift extremely early and I had enough time to watch Netflix and eat. As soon as I sat down to get comfortable and do all of that, one of my friends wrote me, asked me if I was all right. And I'm like, what do you mean I'm all right? He was like, bro, your face is in the news. I'm like, what are you talking about?

• 45:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Someone had reposted Stewart's video on Twitter.

• 45:47Speaker 09

  So I get on Twitter and I start seeing my video trending and it's not my page though. Some girl on Twitter. I don't know who she is. She already got a million views. I'm like, no, this is crazy.

• 45:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Once the video went viral on Twitter, it was picked up by media outlets.

• 46:03Speaker 09

  I thought it was funny at first and then I was like, nah. It's disturbing to watch. It all started with this video. A young Hasidic Jewish boy is mocked and berated. For his haircut in a video that went viral. The man who posted that video identified as Quay Sean James. I know at the end of the day, my grandmother watches this. And then probably about 10 minutes later, she was sending me a link of me in the news. And I was like, yeah, this is getting out of hand.

• 46:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  The video was widely condemned as anti-Semitic, sickening and dehumanizing. Facebook took down the video on the grounds that it violated their policy against bullying. Twitter soon followed. As for Quay Sean Stewart, he says he intended the post to be a lighthearted joke and that he's not hateful or racist.

• 46:49Speaker 09

  I'm black, so then there's a lot of people that try to make it a race thing. That made it go even more viral.

• 46:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  He didn't know what to do.

• 46:55Speaker 09

  I felt like I was taking too long to actually address the situation.

• 46:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  But this time, he wasn't sure an apology would even accomplish anything.

• 47:02Speaker 09

  The day that they actually put me in the news is when I knew I was, it was already too late. I felt like it was already too late to apologize. So a day go by, probably two days go by and then it's just constant DMs, constant tweets. My phone keeps messing up. I keep seeing new articles of me in, with my picture in it. I'm like, nah, I gotta do something.

• 47:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  He decided to record his apology live on Twitter. He did it in his car as he was about to head into work.

• 47:30Speaker 09

  Good morning to those that's watching this video right now. My heart just jumped. Like I, I didn't know what to say really. Like I was just so nervous. All right. I just want to sincerely apologize to that young boy and his family. I never meant for anybody to get hurt or for this to be taken the wrong way. It was just a joke and. I'm sorry, like, I'm truly sorry. I was just really trying to, like, get people to understand where I was coming from. I don't want this to be like a race thing. I have nothing against Jewish people. I have friends that are Jewish. My babysitter growing up was Jewish. It's nothing. Like, I have nothing against Jewish people. Trust me, they done been through too much, too much. We've been through as much as they've been through. They've been through worse. I should have been more considerate and more open to other people's feelings.

• 48:13Speaker 09

  That came from the heart. Everything I said, I really meant that. That was just me being real immature. That right there is a form of bullying, and I'm truly sorry for that. That right there, I cannot take that back. I can't. Like, I can't take it back. I'm truly sorry for what I've done. My actions are, oh my, I can't even speak right now. That's how upset I am.

• 48:37Speaker 09

  I didn't expect anybody to gravitate to my apology. I'm just apologizing for something that I did wrong.

• 48:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  But people did gravitate to Stuart's apology.

• 48:46Speaker 09

  It was at, like, 500,000 views, and I'm just like, whoa. So I started reading the comments, and I was just like, this is a lot.

• 48:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  His apology was praised by leaders in the Hasidic community and well beyond.

• 48:58Speaker 10

  I'm humbled. I mean, I wish I could be so, if I could take back things that I did in such a humble way.

• 49:06Speaker 09

  And I didn't expect none of that, so it was just shocking to me completely.

• 49:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Stuart had a history of helping feed homeless people, buying the food himself, making sandwiches to give out. Just a few months before the offending video, he'd been featured in a local news story for his work. He said he'd grown up in a shelter and now wanted to give back. He brought this up now while he was tweeting back and forth with Jewish leaders.

• 49:30Speaker 09

  The Jewish community has a lot of soup kitchens in Brooklyn, and I've been aware of that when I was working out there. And I told them, I feed the homeless. Like, I have no problem coming out there to help you. I realize I have a lot of kitchens. So somebody seen that tweet, organizations started reaching out to me. So I went out there and I did the soup kitchen with them.

• 49:47Speaker 14

  Quay Sean Stewart of Westchester volunteering at Maspia, a kosher soup kitchen. A mission, he says, to show that he's sorry for offending the Jewish community.

• 49:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Historically, there'd been serious friction between the Black and Hasidic communities in some New York neighborhoods. Stuart's original video had threatened to ramp up that friction. In the end, it seems he helped deflate it.

• 50:12Speaker 09

  I definitely was enlightened of the whole Jewish situation, the Holocaust and everything. I've gained a whole bunch of knowledge since then in reference to that.

• 50:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's hard to not be inspired on some level by the Quayshawn Stewart story. You could easily imagine how it might have gone the other way. But that, says Karen Cerulo of Rutgers, is the power of a legitimate apology. She gives Stewart's apology much higher marks than most celebrity apologies.

• 50:41Speaker 05

  He starts out by centering our focus on the victim. He's talking about the little boy. He's talking about the family and he is highlighting that he did something to offend these people. It's a great start. The end of his apology is really a true expression of remorse. So, good starting place, good ending place, that's big.

• 51:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  And I'm sorry, we can't go on any longer, but it's time to go. If you want to hear a couple earlier episodes that are related to this one, check them out in our archive. One's called "That's a Great Question." The other is "What Do Medieval Nuns and Bo Jackson Have in Common?" Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio. I think creativity is about making new connections.

• 51:28Speaker 15

  I wanted to study creativity, but I wanted to do it in a way that was different than what most psychologists did.

• 51:37Speaker 16

  So, we identify creativity as essentially novelty that works.

• 51:42Speaker 17

  I can hear you. I just have to play these notes. I mean, it's a scene rule, but it just.

• 51:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's not written on.

• 51:47Speaker 17

  I just want my lips up.

• 51:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Sure, creativity has become just another corporate buzzword by now, but where would the world be without it? We look into the science of creativity and the myths, where it comes from and how to get it into your life. We hear from musicians like Wynton Marsalis and Elvis Costello, artists like Ai Weiwei and Myra Kalman, the novelist Jennifer Egan, the filmmaker Seth Gordon, inventors like Jessica Matthews and James Dyson, and one of the people behind what may become a massive scientific revolution. As you're actually doing experiments, you realize, oh, we could do this. Oh, we could do this. How to be creative. It's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 52:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Greg Rosalsky. Our staff also includes Alison Kreglo, Greg Rippon, Alvin Melathe, Harry Huggins, and Zach Lepinski. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers. All the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The entire archive is available on the Stitcher app or at Freakonomics.com, where we also publish transcripts and show notes and more. If you want the entire archive ad-free, plus lots of bonus episodes, go to StitcherPremium.com/Freakonomics. We can also be found on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn,

• 53:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  or via email at [email protected]. Freakonomics Radio also plays on most of your better NPR stations. Check your local station for details. As always, thanks for listening.

• 53:48Speaker 06

  Stitcher.

• 53:54Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 54:25Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 55:03Speaker 18

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