The harder the words, the more sincere the ‘sorry’

We all mess up at times. As such, knowing how to deliver a worthy apology is an important skill. Some particular flourishes, such as crying or kneeling, have been shown to help public apologies to go down better, while other research has found that apologies that are perceived to be more costly seem more sincere. That cost could take the form of compensation for damages, say, or paying for an apology to be delivered.

Shiri Lev-Ari at Royal Holloway, University of London, wondered whether an apology that is costly because it takes more effort might also be better-received. As she notes in her new paper in the British Journal of Psychology, it requires more physical effort to speak a longer word, and more cognitive effort to retrieve a less commonly used word from memory; it may then follow that people instinctively make more effort to use such words while making sincere apologies. Whether this was the case, and whether it makes any difference to the person on the receiving end, was the subject of her latest investigation.

In the first of two studies, she identified 50 apologies made on social media (mostly X), half by celebrities and half by regular users. She also identified 10 statements that were not apologies that had been posted by each of the apologisers.

When Lev-Ari analysed all the messages, she found that apologies contained longer words than non-apologies (though this difference was small, with words in apologies being on average just one letter longer). She also notes, though, that the apologetic posts were far longer overall than the other posts. "This difference in overall length potentially also signals effort on the side of the apologizers," she writes. The words used in apologies were no less common (in terms of everyday usage) than those in the other messages, however.

In the second study, 49 UK-based adults read groups of three variations on the same apologetic sentence. One version contained short and commonly used words, another had short and less commonly used words, and a third contained long and uncommonly used words. (For example: 'I now see that joking about these issues is very rude.' 'I now realise that joking about these issues is highly rude.' 'I now recognise that joking about these issues is exceedingly rude.') On each trial, the participants identified what they felt to be the most and least apologetic sentences.

Consistent with the results of the first study, Lev-Ari found that the statements containing longer words were deemed to be more apologetic. Again, the commonness of the words didn't have an independent effect, though.

Further investigations may reveal whether verbal, rather than written, apologies with longer words are also perceived to be more sincere, or whether the formality of a word or phrase is important. (More commonly used words do also tend to be shorter, and more formal words — which might also signal that a speaker is taking an issue more seriously — tend to be longer.)

It would also be interesting to know whether people who perhaps don't naturally use longer words when apologising could benefit from doing so. This work does suggest, though, that next time you think about saying, 'I'm really sorry', it could be better to go for something like 'I'm enormously sorry' instead.

Read the paper in full:
Lev‐Ari, S. (2025). Sorries seem to have the harder words. British Journal of Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12790

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