My Bad

All of us are offensive some of the time – usually in error but often enough on purpose. Anyone who thinks he or she isn’t is in need of self-reflection. (I am speaking of genuine offense: the strategic taking of offense as a passive aggressive method to backfoot an opponent or gain an advantage is another topic altogether.) Humans are sometimes clumsy, sometimes thoughtless, and sometimes cruel. No exceptions. Society and personal relationships continue to function anyway partly by our willingness to let pass the bulk of the (literal and metaphorical) pokes in the ribs and partly by apologies for the rest – both the giving and the getting of them.

Why does “I’m sorry” matter? The expression rarely fixes whatever the offense was, so what does it accomplish? It is really about respect or the lack of it. Failing to acknowledge that we crossed a line makes it seem as though the other person doesn’t matter. It verges on contempt. That is probably a worse offense than the initial transgression. This is made evident by reactions to politician-style non-apologies, as in “I’m sorry you feel that way.” The listener hears this (correctly) as meaning he is in the wrong for feeling that way. The defensive “I only did it because…” is similarly intended to place the blame on the offended party. Both are likely to deepen any seething resentment in the listener. A simple “I’m sorry” on the other hand, means “I stepped on your toes, but I regret it and don’t disrespect you.” Usually that is enough. Sometimes it isn’t (it depends on how big and damaging the offense was) but even in those cases it is a step in the right direction.

Recurring line in Get Smart: "Sorry about
that, Chief."

The greatest cause of misunderstanding in the realm of apologies is the differing thresholds people have for offense and what they regard as offensive.  After all, just because someone doesn’t like what we say or do is no reason by itself to apologize for it. Saying “It is bad to be a crack addict” does not require an apology to crackheads who are offended by the statement, even if some might think so. There is no way to eliminate these threshold differences completely, but a little empathy can do no harm.

Unsurprisingly there are sex differences in thresholds. As always when discussing such differences, it is important to note that we are talking about the centerlines of bell curves; much of the curves overlap, so many men and women have characteristics opposite to the average. Yet, the average still tells us something. There is a stereotype that men rarely apologize (supposedly from pride) whereas women apologize all the time. Professor Karina Schumann, PhD, at the University of Pittsburgh decided to put this to the test. The results were more nuanced than the stereotypes. She stated them in an APA podcast:
 
“And what I found across numerous studies was that women did apologize more frequently in their daily life… but we also saw a higher frequency of offenses reported. And what that means is when we looked at the proportion of offenses that they were apologizing for, it was identical to men's proportion of offenses that they were apologizing for… And so this made us think, is there a difference in perceptions of severity here where men are less likely to see an offense as occurring… because they just don't see it as bothersome as women see it... And so we tested this in a bunch of follow up studies with more controlled methods where we gave men and women the exact same offenses, and we had them rate how severe they were, and how much an apology was deserved and how likely they were to apologize. And what we saw consistently study after study was that men and women saw the identical offenses differently.”
 
In other words, men on average have a higher threshold than women for what is apology-worthy whether on the giving or the receiving end, leading all too often to regarding one another as either unreasonable or disrespectful. I doubt there is any cure for this, but it helps to be aware of it, and to recognize that there is a perspective from which the other party is neither unreasonable nor disrespectful.
 

Joey Heatherton – I’m Sorry