Last week, we asked Cognitive Daily readers to tell us what they believed was an acceptable excuse for two very different social gaffes. Here's the first scenario:
Suppose a co-worker insulted you during a meeting which involved your boss and several colleagues. The insult was audible to all, and caused you grave embarrassment.
And here's the second:
Suppose a friend calls you 15 minutes before to cancel a lunch meeting that had been planned for several days.
In each case, we provided the same eight excuses, and asked readers to tell us which were acceptable. We also asked readers to answer a few personal questions -- about age, gender, and political affiliation, to see if any of these factors affected their responses. So, what personal qualities make you more likely to accept an excuse?
One of the commenters on last week's post, James Hanley, a political scientist, argued that asking political affiliation on a simple left-right (conservative-liberal) scale is not very revealing. I responded that he may be right, and that I'd be the first to admit it if he was. Well, allow me to be the first to admit it -- here's a chart summarizing responses to the first scenario, broken down by political affiliation:
The responses for self-identified social conservatives and liberals paralleled each other nearly identically. None of the conservative/liberal differences rose to the level of statistical significance. The same result held for the second scenario, and for male/female differences. However, when we compared respondents younger than 30 to those 30 and older, we did identify a pattern:
Older adults were in general less likely than younger adults to accept excuses, and for three excuses in particular, the results were significant: Older adults were less willing to accept a father's death, a cheating wife, or a harried schedule as an excuse for an insult. So at what age do people become less willing to accept excuses? We took a closer look at two of the responses, and here's what we found:
The yellow bars show the portion of respondents at each age level who felt that the death of a father was an acceptable excuse for insulting a co-worker, and the green bars show those who felt allergies were a good enough reason to cancel lunch. In both cases, there's a large drop-off between 20-somethings and 30-somethings. This suggests that people in their thirties and older may be less forgiving than younger people in a variety of circumstances. Given research we've reported on in Cognitive Daily suggesting that forgiveness is good for your health, this lack of forgiveness in older adults should probably be researched in a somewhat less casual manner than we've done here.
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"Not enough sleep" looks almost as if it would be significantly different between age-groups (but you have the raw data - I ahve no idea). Does that imply that younger people are more aware of the need to sleep, while the older still consider sleep to be a socially shameful activity, i.e., sleeping as a sign of laziness.
No, sleep doesn't quite reach significance. The difference is actually smaller on the lunch scenario. Perhaps with a larger sample size we'd find something there, but it's not in this data set.
I think there's actually a conceptual confusion here, at least as relates to forgiveness.
I take it an "excuse" is something that identifies a circumstance that warrants one's behavior. Cancelling lunch because your allergies would have you sneezing all over the ceviche seems like a perfectly good excuse. On the other hand, offering as an "excuse" for insulting a co-worker in front of the boss that one's father has died ... well, it kind of sounds like one is claiming that one isn't responsible because the grief made one mean.
In the latter case, the "excuse" may be suspect (perhaps the bereaved was already mean and grief just loosened his tongue), and, more importantly, there isn't clearly a "sorry!" attached to the excuse. Forgiveness is usually premised on an expression of regret. Expressing regret in the same breath as the (suspect) excuse seems like a move to distance oneself from responsibility rather than taking responsibility. On the other hand, just expressing regret (and not also trying to weasel out of responsibility) might be more likely to elicit forgiveness.
(I'm past that forgiving age-group, though, so YMMV!)
Could the differences in age responses be affected by how expected the occurance is? Twenty-somethings don't expect their forty-somethings fathers to die, so its a much more significant event. By the time they are 30 or 40-somethings, they have seen enough people cope with the loss of a father that they just expect everyone to go on as if nothing has happened?
As for the allergies, have the older people just figured out that if you let every infirmity or physical discomfort get in the way of living your life, then you won't be enjoying what you have?
I agree with Dr. Free-Ride.
Unfortunately, I never saw the actual poll questions, so I'm flying a bit blind here, but...
There is a big subtle weirdness about apologies and excuses. If somebody simply makes an excuse, rather than simply apologizing, or apologizing with an excuse/explanation, it can be quite offensive. (Non-apology "apologies" can be infuriating.)
If the question is what counts as an acceptable excuse to a third party---e.g., explaining to the boss why you insulted a co-worker, that's usually quite different from what counts as an excuse to the second party. (I.e., the person you insulted.) The boss mostly needs to know that this is not typical of you, and is not likely to happen often; the co-worker mostly needs to know that you're sorry.
Often, it is helpful to give an excuse/explanation to the second party, if and only if it comes across as "I'd never have said that under normal circumstances, because it's not what I think of you when I'm in my right mind, and besides, I really do care about your feelings; sorry I lost perspective on both counts."
But if it comes across as "I don't owe you much of an apology, because my personal issues are more important than your feelings," giving an excuse/explanation can have the opposite effect.
It can also be bad if it comes across as "I'm sorry I said that, normally I'd hide what I think of you, but I was too stressed out to be nice; I'll try not to be so honest with you in the future." In that case, it's just too clear that the cat is out of the bag. (And is a cat.)
I've thought about this a bit recently because I have a friend who is among the worst apologizers I've ever met. This person seldom really apologizes, or understands the need to. (Or what a actual apology would be like.)
My friend thinks it's sufficient to say "I'm sorry if you took offense at what I said; I didn't mean to upset you," which only infuriates people more, because often they were right to take offense, at least given their understanding of the situation, and that just doesn't address the main issue.
Either they were wrong to take offense, or this friend was wrong to give it, or maybe there was a big misunderstanding that needs clarification---offense was mistakenly taken. Which is it? "I didn't mean to piss you off so much" doesn't typically satisfy anybody. (Luckily, it's not usually me on the receiving end of this kind of non-apology.)
Anyway, I think differences in responses might depend heavily on different understandings of the questions; some people may assume the "excuse" is used artfully in the context of a sincere apology, to mitigate offense. Others may assume the opposite---that it's just used to evade responsibility.