Today I read an article about a study that supposedly had discovered that people think that apologies are more valuable than they actually are. This leads to a disappointment upon being given an apology, supposedly.
Now let's examine this a wee bit closer, shall we? The scenario that participants of the study were presented with was as follows. In a lab room, likely a confined space in a basement on some campus, people were given 10 euros which they could either give to some undefined 'partner' (likely no one) or keep for themselves. If they gave their money to their 'partner', their partner got triple the amount you gave, 30 euros, and then in turn gave you 5 under the pretense that they could choose however much to give back to you as they pleased. The study had two groups. One group of participants were given an apology and the other group of participants were asked to imagine they'd been given an apology.
Maybe it's just me, but...this scenario seems flawed. First off, there's no mention of what proportion just kept the money which leads to an entirely different sort of conclusion. Second, when in your life will you ever experience something like this? There are no established social rules that dictate proper behaviour. Is an apology really even necessary? Do these participants care if their 'partner' apologizes for being greedy in the face of a complete stranger? And third, there is absolutely no description of the apology. Maybe it was a bad apology and the ones people imagined were more appropriate.
Now, it's possible that the actual journal article is much better and more complete. However, how many people will read the journal article? Very few. What's interesting is that the public/patient rating of the article is much higher than the ratings given by professionals. This leads me to believe that only the people who are trained to look for inadequacies in reporting (via secondary school) actually ask these sorts of questions. A lot of people sort of skip through the sections on how the study was done and just read the conclusion. This bugs me. After having met and conversed with university and graduate students as well as professors, I've come to the realization that researchers are every bit as capable of making mistakes as your neighbours. (I'd say ourselves, but many people like to believe they're perfect.) And sometimes, they are motivated to fudge the data a little, or not think through the experiment well enough due to time and publishing pressures.
This is why we get conflicting messages from science. This is why we need to actually think about what we're reading and hearing. There was once a time when I worked on a project comparing newspaper articles to the journal articles they refer to. I was a bit surprised to see how misrepresented the study was, but then I was completely shocked and enraged when the same study was talked about on an episode of The Doctors where it was abundantly clear that they'd never read the original article, and maybe not even the newspaper article. The message that was conveyed to viewers on tv was almost opposite to what was found in the study! And yet that's what people are listening to.
It's scary coming across things like that, but I'm sure it happens far more frequently than we realize. So please, think about things. If you don't have time to think about the things you hear, don't act on them! Be accountable for your actions, because apparently if you rely on others to be accountable, their apologies are going to be disappointing.
Click here to read the article to which I am referring.
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