 "Photo: N/A")
Being a sorry person might help you more than you know.
OSU Assistant accounting professor Robert Cornell and Rick Warne of George Mason University discovered that if a person expresses regret or sorrow without admitting guilt for an accused act or situation without actually being guilty, the verdict will be more favorable as opposed to if they show no remorse at all, according to their research.
“This was an accounting research project at first,” Warne said. “It dealt with the accounting aspects of malpractice and business lawsuits. Then as we went along, we realized it could have the same implications and results in civil and criminal suits.”
Warne said apologizing helps diffuse a situation, whether in traffic or in a courtroom.
By expressing regret without taking ownership and guilt for the accused act, a person takes away a judge or jury’s ability to assign the blame for what has actually happened, said Donald Worthington, Payne County District Court Judge.
“An apology can have a great effect in any kind of case in regards to a decision,” Worthington said. “It makes it a very difficult task to assign blame when someone has apologized and shown true regret.”
Taking a proactive stance and apologizing at the onset of an incident gives the plaintiff a sense of closure and relief that a mistake had been made and regret was felt.
Cornell said it’s better than the alternative — sitting and waiting to find out what happens and then giving an apology as a reaction.
“We used a form of social psychology called remedial tactics in our research,” Cornell said.
“It came down to hindsight biased. An example I like to use is if you buy a lottery ticket for a dollar and you lose, did you just waste that dollar? In your mind and for others, it seems that way.”
Cornell said if the same lottery ticket makes you a millionaire, then it’s money well spent.
“It is easy to look back on an outcome and judge the action taken as correct or not,” Cornell said.
Apologies aren’t limited to civil and criminal law suits. Apology laws have been enacted that deal with malpractice cases. Warne and Cornell started their research when they were both working toward their doctorates in accounting at the University of Utah.
“In our research we found where hospitals reviewed and revamped their risk management policies to start accommodating apologies by doctors and health care providers,” Cornell said. “After the change in policy, these institutions started seeing a decrease in malpractice lawsuits, sometimes by as much as two-thirds.
“All for simply saying they were sorry.”
Be the first to comment on this article!