Saying Sorry Might Save Your Relationship

Of course, actions speak louder than words. Yet a recent study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that after a disagreement, saying "sorry" really does mean a lot. As a matter of fact, saying sorry and mending the hurt could be the difference between healing a relationship, romantic or otherwise, or unfortunately, walking away permanently.

Researchers Miami University, Minnesota University and the University of California at Los Angeles found that saying sorry along with buying gifts such as flowers was likely to help the victim forgive or get over the hurt quicker.

"Conciliatory gestures, such as apologies were associated with increases in victims' perceptions of their transgressors' relationship value and reductions in perceptions of their transgressors' exploitation risk," researchers noted in a news release. 

Researchers found that apologies can help victims feel like those who caused ill will still value the relationship and are less likely to cause issues in the future. This also helped reduce concerns regarding revenge and helped with the idea of forgiveness, reconciliation and kindness in the future.

"These results strongly suggest that conciliatory gestures facilitate forgiveness and reduce anger by modifying victims' perceptions of their transgressors' value as relationship partners and likelihood of recidivism," researchers added. "Conflict is an inevitable component of social life, and natural selection has exerted strong effects on many organisms to facilitate victory in conflict and to deter conspecifics from imposing harms upon them. Like many species, humans likely possess cognitive systems whose function is to motivate revenge as a means of deterring individuals who have harmed them from harming them again in the future."

"However, many social relationships often retain value even after conflicts have occurred between interactants, so natural selection has very likely also endowed humans with cognitive systems whose function is to motivate reconciliation with transgressors whom they perceive as valuable and nonthreatening, notwithstanding their harmful prior actions," they concluded.