How to make your apology more effective

It can be difficult to find the right words to show that it is being sincere when apologizing, but there are linguistic clues that you can use to convey your message.

Shiri Lev-AriProfessor of Psychology, Royal Holloway University of London, said that his suggests that the length of the words he chooses influences the sincerity of the excuse.

According to, the apology are often described as “empty words– Anyone can say that they feel very, regardless of what they really feel. But the apologies work.

Research shows that people feel better and are more likely to cooperate again with someone who hurt them If that person apologizes.

A way to make a Further apology is to make you more expensive. When those who apologize are willing to incur at a cost in the form of money, effort or time, the apology is better received.

One found that people seemed more convinced by excuses than the person who apologized had to spend money to deliver the message than for those who could be delivered at no cost.

Similarly, this study found that the excuses are more convincing if the transgressor bother to deliver the messagehow to appear in a morning class where you are not enrolled to apologize to a friend, instead of apologizing at the next convenient opportunity.

However, There are other ways to strive By apologizing. THE length and Frequency of a word affect the difficulty of saying or writing. The longest words require more articulation.

Unusual words are harder to remembersay or write. Therefore, if anyone wants to express their regret making a greater effort by apologizing, they can use words Longer and less common.

At the same time, unusual words are also harder to understand, which means that they overload both the recipient and the transgressor. But the longest words that are not uncommon are usually no longer difficult to understand.

Tend to be more distinct than other wordswhich means they may even be easier to understand. A sophisticated person in apologizing, so you can select longer but no rarer words – making the apology more difficult for yourself, but not for the recipient.

LEV-RI performed two studies to investigate The role of the length and frequency of words in the excuses.

One analyzed real world excuses e another tested people’s perception About excuses with words of different lengths and frequencies.

In the first study, it used tweets of the excuses of X written by 25 celebrities and 25 non -famous peoplewhich were compared to other tweets of the same users.

The results of LEV-RI showed that the tweets of excuses consisted of longer words than tweets that were not excuses. However, did not differ at the frequency of the words.

In a second study, the teacher examined If people realized the excuses with longer or less common words as more apologetics. Participants were presented to Three examples of excuses that had the same meaning but differ in the length or frequency of words.

Example 1:

My action does not show who I am (short, common)
My action does not reflect my true self (short, less common)
My action does not represent my true character (long, less common)

Example 2:

I did not intend to respond in a hostile (short, common) way
I did not intend to respond aggressively (short, less common)
I did not intend to respond in a conflicting way (long, less common)

Participants received the sentences for random e they classified them from the least apologetics.

The results showed that participants classified the sentences with words longer as more apologetics than the sentences with short words that were similar in terms of frequency.

On the other hand, the Frequency of words did not influence how apologetic the sentences seemed.

OS R.Sulted from both studies are similar. People use longer words when they apologize and consider excuses with longer words as more apologetic. But excuses that employ unusual words do not seem to have the same effect.

In other words, people seem to express their regret by making excuses that are harder to say or write, but no longer difficult to understand to recipients.

This research shows that “we transmit messages not only through the meaning of the words we use, but also through the form of words. It also shows how the form of a word (in this case, its length) can express a contextual meaning, that is, the word“ character ”does not have an apologetic meaning in general, but in the context of an apology, yours length symbolizes effort and can be interpreted as an expression of Greater remorse.