had a fight with a partner yesterday where I was completely in the wrong, so today when we met up again to discuss it, I bought flowers (one reddish rose, one white blossom, two blue blossoms) beforehand
and presented it with the rest of my apology, in an embarrassed monotone, because by all accounts this should not work to affect his emotions at all, and I was doing this in a kind of “hopefully this alien ritual works to convey my earnestness because I don’t have a lot of additional vectors for it… sorry if you perceive it as a ridiculous and ineffective bit of bribery” way
the presence or absence of flowers seems orthogonal to my internal state (e.g. contrition, probability of future improvement). they’re not a useful gift. they’re not zero signal of caring, but it’s a low barrier to entry signal. getting flowers is not difficult or very expensive
but he said it worked! I grilled him about it. here are my findings.
he said that the flowers reduced his anger to 60% of initial anger when he walked in through the door
I asked whether more flowers would have worked better. he said a full bouquet (probably 20 flowers?) would have been noticeably better, but the curve goes flat after that.
I asked him how much 20 flowers would have reduced his anger, and he said to 45%. so here’s a graph extrapolation (that does not account for non-flower factors like the quality of the apology)
i think at some point it should go back up. like you’ve bought an inconvenient number of flowers to the point of insincerity
“what the hell am i going to do with 1000 flowers. I’m now equally as mad about a second thing”
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