(Scientific American) -- Certain character traits influence people's willingness to apologize
After a fight and before forgiveness often comes an apology. But saying “I’m sorry” comes more easily for some people than it does for others. A new study suggests that specific personality traits offer clues about whether a person is likely to offer a mea culpa.
Psychologist Andrew Howell and his colleagues at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton devised a questionnaire to measure a person’s willingness to beg someone’s pardon. They asked participants to indicate their level of agreement with a series of statements, such as “My continued anger often gets in the way of me apologizing” or “If I think no one will know what I have done, I am likely not to apologize.” The researchers then used the answers to determine every participant’s “proclivity to apologize,” and they cross-referenced these scores with results from a variety of personality assessments.
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