Some smarty-pants psychologists were hanging out in a Berlin restaurant in the 1920s. They were at the forefront of a new field, and we picture them trying to fit everything they saw into their Big New Vision. Psychic fields! Gestalt theory! Psychological tensions! The experimental method!

Needing coffee and cake to fuel their intellectual rapture, they kept an eye on the waiters. The Zeigarnik Effect was discovered when they noticed what those waiters remembered. The waiters had perfect memories for every single sip and crumb – until the bill was paid. Then, amnesia. If there were two big tables of customers, the waiters knew exactly what had been ordered at the table where the bill hadn’t been paid yet. But they didn’t remember the orders from the table where the bill had been paid.

Why should they? Old news. But it was interesting how total the forgetting was – how did that happen?

Cafe Heinrichhof, Vienna, 1912. Moriz Jung.

One of the psychologists was the young Bluma Zeigarnik, who did her dissertation on the effect the waiters displayed. No, she did not do her dissertation by hanging out in coffee houses. (Nice idea, though – are you a grad student by any chance?)

Zeigarnik gave experimental subjects various tasks like puzzles, math problems, or stringing beads. Some subjects were interrupted in the middle of what they were doing. An hour later she asked people what their task had been. Those who had been interrupted were twice as likely to remember the task as those who were allowed to finish the thing.

She formulated her findings as “Unfinished tasks are remembered approximately twice as well as completed ones.” (Actually, she wrote “Die unerledigten Handlungen werden besser, und zwar durchschnittlich nahezu doppelt so gut behalten wie die erledigten.”)

(Zeigarnik’s biography is tumultuous and tragic. In hindsight, the Zeigarniks’ move to Moscow may have been ill-advised.)

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute Saloon, when they suddenly noticed an odd phenomenon.

While the Zeigarnik Effect is well-known, and often referenced, experimenters sometimes cannot replicate the effect. We suspect this may be because they’re giving people tasks that are just too boring to care about finishing. (Ooh – why not open a fake cafe?)

Here’s how SorryWatch sees the Zeigarnik Effect relating to apologies. If you messed up somehow, and it still weighs on you, or bugs you when you wake up at four a.m., it might be because that mess is unfinished. Still hanging there. An apology can turn that regrettable episode into a finished one, and let you stop wincing at the memory.

It might even stop being a memory. Sumac knows this from past events she wanted to write about for SorryWatch, but can no longer remember well enough. Once she said a stupid thing, meant as a joke (uh huh). It kept bothering her until she invited Nicole to lunch and apologized. It stopped bothering her so completely that now she can’t remember the stupid thing she said. Damn it! That would’ve been perfect for SorryWatch. Probably.

On the one hand, thank you, Doctor Zeigarnik! One less thing to regret during sleepless nights. On the other hand, Bluma – can I please get my memory back?

Being waitstaff: harder than people often realize.

On another occasion, Sumac offended a family member, who continued to resent her insensitivity. Sumac finally realized that she was at fault. She apologized and had her apology accepted. Much later, it occurred to Sumac to write it up for SorryWatch, but she couldn’t remember what she’d done. She asked the family member, and they didn’t remember either.

That’s kind of amazing – a grudge that was forgotten! Eventually, an outside source reminded Sumac of what she’d done, and she was able to write it up.

Maybe we all see this in our lives. We can’t promise you a clear conscience in all domains, but sometimes an apology or two can help with insomnia.

Time to look at a new “how to apologize” study!

Be like this monkey.

The paper, called “An Exploration of the Structure of Effective Apologies,” will be published in the May 2016 issue of Negotiation and Conflict Management Research. (You can read the abstract online.) The academics — lead author Roy Lewicki, professor emeritus of management and human resources at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business; Robert Lount, associate professor of management and human resources at Ohio State; and Beth Polin, assistant professor of management at Eastern Kentucky University — presented fictional apologies to 755 people. They found that the best-received apologies contained all six of the following elements:

1. Expression of regret

2. Explanation of what went wrong

3. Acknowledgment of responsibility

4. Declaration of repentance

5. Offer of repair

6. Request for forgiveness

But all six elements are not created equal! The researchers found that the most important, by far, was acknowledgment of responsibility. And this happens to be the one that a lot of folks have trouble with. As we’ve discussed, most of us don’t like to take ownership of a screw-up because to do so often conflicts with our self-image as a good person. Consciously or not, we want there to be extenuating circumstances, or we want the other person to be responsible for triggering our bad behavior. We loathe saying “I screwed up; I own that” because we loathe believing it. And yet — it’s key to authentic apologies.

Don’t be a weasel.

The second most important element, the study says, is the offer of repair. Here at Sorrywatch, we tend to use the phrase “try to make things right” rather than “offer of repair,” because to us, there are actually two aspects to making things right: One is rectifying the situation directly with the person you hurt (hey, offer to dry-clean the innocent bystander’s shirt you hurled your red Solo cup of tequila on in your tipsy emphatic gesturing; send flowers; make a donation to a charity the person cares about);  the other is explaining how you’ll be damn sure you won’t screw this up again and hurt someone else.

Also don’t be this guy.

Yes, you need to make a legit effort to mend the situation with the person you wronged, but you also need to preemptively make it right with all future people you could wrong. So if you were a tequila-tosser, part of your apology should include a vow to be much more careful in the future. (And if this is not your first or 17th offense, you might also use the incident as the impetus for rehab…and be sure to inform your last victim.) Or if, say, you or someone in your organization said something racially or ethnically insensitive, or if, I dunno, you asked a breastfeeding mother in your establishment not to “do that” here,” it’s not enough to make a gesture toward the person you wronged. You need to send your staff a memo about what the rules of civilization and good conduct are, and tell the person you hurt that you and everyone you work with will undergo sensitivity training…and then actually follow through. You have to do your level best to make reparations on both a micro and macro level.

Make amends to EVERYONE.

The professors found that the third most effective element was essentially a tie among  expression of regret, explanation of what went wrong and declaration of repentance. Now, the way Lewicki and company’s studies were structured, participants read pre-written hypothetical apologies and rated them. We’ve found that in real-world apology situations, “explanation of what went wrong” can get you in a lot of trouble. In real life, explanations often sound a lot like excuses. As we’ve said, if your motives need clarifying, it’s fine to quickly say why you did the thing you did. But don’t fall into the trap of justifying what you did or defending yourself or offering up extenuating circumstances.

Let me explain. (NO.)

The least vital element of an apology, the authors found, is asking for forgiveness. Which is convenient since we think you shouldn’t ask for forgiveness at all. It puts the other person on the spot. It doesn’t give them time to process your apology. It has the (usually unintended but still sucky) effect of “let’s move on,” which is not your decision to make. We think forgiveness is a gift for the other person to grant; it’s not something you get to ask for. As far as we’re concerned, you’re obligated to apologize as quickly as you can; the other person is not obligated to forgive, and it shows a lot of chutzpah for you to ask. If you want forgiveness and you sense you don’t have it, you keep groveling. If the other person wants to process, they will.

Not yet.

Finally: The two experiments the researchers found a distinction between apologies made for a mistake made out of incompetence and a mistake made out of a lack of integrity. (The study subjects were presented with a hypothetical job applicant who made a mistake because he wasn’t familiar with a tax code, and a hypothetical job applicant who filed an incorrect tax return on purpose.) Study participants were much more likely to forgive the person who acted out of ignorance than out of calculation.

Don’t be evil.

This helps explain why so many celebrity and political apologies ring false — we know they’re apologizing for something they knew full well was wrong when they did it.

Lots of viral buzz about a post, on a blog called cuppacocoa, from a teacher named JoEllen, about how she makes her class apologize. Some of her ideas work for me; some emphatically don’t. Let’s discuss!

Have you read the post? OK, I like JoEllen’s notion of urging kids to:

a) say precisely what they’re sorry for.

(In her words: “Wrong: I’m sorry for being mean. Right: I’m sorry for saying that nobody wants to be your friend.”)

b) say WHY their actions were wrong.

(“Wrong: This is wrong because I got in trouble. Right: This is wrong because it hurt your feelings and made you feel bad about yourself.”)

c) say what they’ll do differently from now on.

(“Wrong: In the future, I will not say that. Right: In the future, I will keep unkind words in my head.”)

All very SorryWatch-y. But I take issue with her final step, asking, “Will you forgive me?”

JoEllen says, “This is important to try to restore your friendship. Now, there is no rule that the other person has to forgive you. Sometimes, they won’t. That’s their decision. Hopefully, you will all try to be the kind of friends who will forgive easily, but that’s not something you automatically get just because you apologized. But you should at least ask for it.”

I disagree. Asking to be forgiven at the same time you apologize puts the onus back on the person you’ve wronged. You’re the one who has screwed up; you have no right to cap your apology with a request for a quid pro quo. Effectively, you’re making asking for forgiveness and granting forgiveness equal, and nope, you’re only entitled to the asking part. If the other person wants to volunteer forgiveness, great, but I don’t think you’re being fair by ending your apology with a request for absolution. Give the other person some time to stew, for heaven’s sake. If he or she doesn’t say “no problem” immediately, wait a while and then go back, apologize again, and ask to be forgiven. (This is what the philosopher Maimonides suggested back in the 12th century, as we’ve noted.)

But JoEllen truly lost me with an anecdote about forcing one of her students to apologize.

Usually, it was the same kids that weren’t paying attention and held up the whole class. One day, surprising even myself, I stopped, turned to the offending student, and demanded, “Apologize.”

“Huh?”

“Apologize. To me.”

“Um…” he began, looking around bewildered, “I’m sorry for… not paying attention. This is wrong because… I wasn’t paying attention…”

“Try again.”

“…because you’re upset?” he offered.

“Nope.”

“…because I’m not learning?” he asked.

“Yes, and?”

“And because…” he glanced down nervously.

“Because,” I finished for him, “Now the whole class is waiting for you and you’re wasting our time.”

“Because the whole class–”

“Start from the beginning.”

Yeah, I can be pretty tough on them sometimes. Tough love.

I don’t think this is tough love. I think this is shaming a child. JoEllen points out that this kid is a repeat offender in terms of not paying attention. Is it possible that he has ADD, ADHD, or some other learning issue? Is it possible that he wants to be a good student, but has a hard time not daydreaming? Granted, I’m reading this situation through two filters: that of a parent whose child until recently had an IEP (a specialized education plan because she had trouble with attention and motor skills, with sitting still and staying focused), and that of a person who isn’t a follower of a Christ-centered philosophy, as JoEllen is.

My daughter, now in fourth grade, desperately wants not to tune out. She tries hard. Sometimes, though, in spite of her good intentions, she goes off into her own wee dreamland. This past Sunday, she sobbed late into the night, anxious that she couldn’t understand her notes about the homework because she’d been in la-la-land when it was assigned. She actually wound up doing two DIFFERENT essays (one about Central Park and one about Prospect Park, because she’d written “Brooklyn Central Park” in her notebook and wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do). Then she second-guessed herself and wound up handing in the wrong assignment. What if her teacher had embarrassed her in front of the class for tuning out during the lesson? How would that benefit her or the class? 

So no, a teacher demanding an apology for poor attention doesn’t sit right with me. And it’s not just me. I recently read a delightful, if not so Christ-centered, book called How to Be a Mentsh (& Not a Schmuck) by Yiddish scholar Michael Wex (Harper, 2009). He quotes the Talmud: “It is better for a man to be suspected of adultery with another man’s wife than for him to shame his fellow in public…an adulterer is executed by strangulation, but has a portion in the world to come, whereas one who shames his fellow in public has no portion in the world to come.” Ooh. 

I didn’t know that little snippet of Jewish ethics, but I did know that in the Jewish tradition, someone who causes someone else embarrassment is said to have committed a sin akin to murder. (The exact phrase in the Babylonian Talmud is “If anyone makes his friend’s face turn white in public, it is as if he spilled blood.”) As Dr. Erica Brown, Scholar in Residence at The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington and author of several books on Jewish life and leadership, points out: 

The Ba’alei Ha-Tosafot, medieval commentators on the Talmud, explain that true embarrassment whitens the face. All the blood that gathers in the face at the moment of embarrassment drains from the face leaving the skin white and ghastly. The Talmud focuses on the height of embarrassment – not only its sudden shock but the after-shock. The immediate impact of what was said to us or about us has left, and in its place are the awful consequences, the change of public opinion, the humiliation.

i cannot shame this lobster-eating jew. i have tried.

Recently, we got an email from a reader telling us what her sister, a new preschool teacher, had learned from her Master Teacher about apologies. The Master Teacher had said that the words “I’m sorry” don’t inherently mean much to a four-year-old; most think of those words as the syllables you have to say to get out of trouble. (JoEllen’s experience clearly dovetails with this. So does mine.) But where JoEllen urges her students to name what they’ve done wrong to take the “I’m sorry” to a meaningful place, this teacher suggests that rather than forcing a kid to apologize, “have the child ask if there is anything they could do to make things better for the insulted child.” Our correspondent says that she’s adopted this strategy herself, finding that it works for grownup life too.

I’d argue that the combo of apologizing ALONG WITH trying to figure out what to do to make things better is the truly mature approach to seeking forgiveness. (Better than asking the other person what you can do is to simply do it, if the path to making things right is clear. Again, if you can possibly avoid putting the onus on the other person, bear it yourself. But if the path to redemption is murky, then yes, asking what you can do is the way to go.) We can’t expect our kids to get it right from the get-go. That’s what modeling good behavior is about, and that’s what education is about. Start in the way you wish to go on. We all sin. We all screw up. We all owe other people apologies more often than we’d like.

I think the Christians and the Jews can agree on that. But the question for every individual, every parent, every teacher, is how we get from the mistake to the expiation.

people of all ages and faiths like cake.

Jean Quan, mayor of Oakland, California, keeps being forced to have difficult conversations about using her cell phone while driving. Or not.

Jean Quan in 2010. Apparently not on the phone.

Most recently, Quan’s car was involved in a fender-bender. The other driver said Quan, talking on a cell phone, ran a red light, causing the other driver to strike Quan’s rear tire. Quan, or her office, said she “absolutely” was not talking on a phone. Whether she ran a red they were less certain about. They said they would have police check Quan’s phone records, to prove she wasn’t on the phone.

(This doesn’t speak to whether she was looking at the phone, say to check the time as she dashed from one church meeting to another.)

It’s she-said-she-said, and I have no idea what happened. Someone came forward who says the light was yellow, which is completely possible. But it’s awkward for Quan because it came a week after she was twice photographed, by different people, driving while talking on a cell phone.

KRON-TV’s Stanley Roberts gave Quan a hard time about this. He told her that she was the mayor of a large metropolitan city and people looked up to her for leadership.

(People do that?)

She said, “I know, I know. So that I’m chastened and apologetic and will do my best to meet both of my commitments.” (Both? What, her commitment to drive and her commitment to talk on the phone?)

I just called to say GET OFF the PHONE MARINE.

He asked if she was going to keep doing it. She said “I’m going to try not to.”

She said she works “like 24-7.” Because meetings. “It’s very easy unconsciously to do things like that,” she explained. “You caught me twice – are you following me around?” No, the photographers were random citizens. Who, aaah, were also driving while snapping her picture.

Asked if she had any thoughts to share, Quan said. “It’s a good time to pause and all of us think about how we can do things like that unconsciously and it’s not safe.”

Okay, I will leave aside, I will not even mention, the responsibility-shifting in “all of us… do things like that unconsciously” or the feebleness of “I will do my best” and “I will try not to.” She’s not completely wrong, as shown by the gotcha photographers (whom Quan calls papparazzi) driving and snapping with their own phones.

I wasn’t on the phone. I just needed to look at my phone to see what time it was.

But it is certainly possible for her to go cold turkey on the phone use. It would be easy for her to switch to a hands-free phone. Just because many citizens behave badly and illegally doesn’t mean she should. She’s not helpless.

Not a word about all that. Because what I want to discuss is that Quan said she was “apologetic” but did not apologize.

What’s the difference?

It has been pointed out to me by thoughtful friends that there is a category of speech called performative utterances. (Thank you, Katherine Catmull. Thank you, Mike Godwin.) As soon as they pointed this out, I started noticing such utterances everywhere.

A performative utterance is when something you say is an action. For example, you say “I promise” and those words are the action of promising. “I solemnly swear” is the act of taking an oath. Some say naming a child is a performative utterance.

“I bet five dollars he doesn’t swallow the goldfish.”

“I surrender.”

A fine example is saying “I do” at your wedding.

Take this as a compliment. I don’t bless just any son.

An interesting example is in Genesis 27, when Isaac, blind in his old age, is tricked into blessing Jacob when he thinks he is blessing his other son Esau. The words of the blessing are the act of blessing Jacob, and they can’t be undone.

Notice that a performative utterance may not be sincere. You may promise something while secretly planning to do something else, but you still promised, and you can still be held to the promise.

This distinction clarifies for me why people sometimes avoid (probably without knowing why) the words “I apologize” or “I’m sorry” and instead gab about things being regrettable or how bad they feel.

Apologies are performative utterances. If done correctly. Normally.

When Quan said she was “apologetic,” that wasn’t an apology. It was a mere description. (People can describe themselves inaccurately, as any user of dating sites can tell you.)

“I apologize” is an apology. “I am apologetic” is not.

“I solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” is an oath. “I’m a truthful person” is not.

“I do” when they ask you if you take this person to be your lawfully-wedded is a vow. “I’m feeling matrimonial” is not. NO IT IS NOT NO. Even if you think it’s funny.

Our pal Michael Orbach pointed us (via boing boing) toward Professor Ben Ho’s look at the economic value of apologies. Here’s what Ho, an assistant professor of economics at Vassar, says about the existing research.

If you do it right, apology is good for your bottom line! In a study called “Mea Culpa: Predicting Stock Prices From Organizational Attributions,” published in Personality Social Psychology Bulletin in 2004, F. Lee, C Peterson and L Tiedens found that “companies that admitted responsibility for bad earnings had higher stock prices one year later than those who did not.” (I think the “taking responsibility” element is key. It’s not enough to say “sorry the market didn’t rebound as quickly as we’d hoped” or “due to unforeseen difficulties with our manufacturing plant in Sheboygan…” or something. It’s the ownership, stupid.) And Ho’s own paper with Elaine Liu, “Does sorry work? The impact of apology laws on medical malpractice,” published in Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in 2001, found that after a given state passed a law encouraging doctors to apologize (by making such apologies inadmissible in court), that state’s malpractice cases settled 19-20% faster, and there was a 16-18% reduction in the number of claims filed in the first place. And the most severe cases were the ones most likely to settle quickly. So far, 36 states have passed such laws. SEEMS LIKE A PLAN, FOURTEEN REMAINING STATES.

Ho’s research, influenced by game theory, has found that to be effective, apologies have to be perceived as difficult. (“The fundamental insight of the model is that for an apology to restore the broken trust, the apology must be hard,” is the way he puts it.)

When we are wronged, we all want the transgressor to apologise. However, often when they apologise, we punish them for it. We make them feel bad. The reason? If an apology were easy, it would no longer have any meaning.

So for Ho, the ritual excoriation of the sinner in social media has an important function. When most of us screw up –us regular schmoes, the writers and doctors and businessfolk — we don’t have the honor (/sarcasm) of being castigated by the public at large for what we did. We are not Biebers, living out our cruelties and incompetencies on a wide stage. For many lawyers and physicians, the apology itself is the opportunity for catharsis for the sinned-against.

Ho’s conclusion that apologies, to be received well, must be seen as difficult is borne out in our analyses. The apologies that work (and don’t cause more mockage by us, or by the Twitterverse) are the ones that take ownership, that completely take responsibility for the wrongdoing, that offer no excuses, that don’t use weasel words like “if anyone was offended” or “even though everyone else was doing it.” The fact that these apologies leave you no crutches, no scapegoats, no bright shiny objects to stand behind — that’s what makes them hard. And worth making. And worth accepting. And worth money, apparently.

Our pal Ivan Oransky at Retraction Watch, who’s also the VP of MedPage Today, alerted us to a terrific MedPage Today video about how and why doctors should apologize. It’s not embeddable, but you can watch it here.

You should probably apologize if you perform a hair transplant with a pizza cutter.[/caption]

A summary of the key points:

Two out of 10 malpractice claims arise as a result of poor communication between doctors and patients. When doctors own up to what happened and apologize, patients are less likely to sue.

Eric Thomas, MD, PhD, a professor of internal medicine at the UT Health Science Center in Houston, talks about research into medical apologies, then adds:

Here in the University of Texas system, we have seen a reduction in claims since we have trained our clinicians in how to have these conversations and encouraged them to disclose and apologize. And importantly, medical malpractice insurers are now encouraging their insured physicians to apologize and tell patients about why things went wrong and offer compensation even outside the court system. So it’s pretty clear now that it’s not only the right thing to do, but it does reduce claims.

(Yup. As Atul Gawande wrote in Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, “Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.”)

Chatón T. Turner, Associate Counsel at the UPMC/University of Pittsburgh Medical Center continues:

There was a lot of work done by a lot of well-intentioned lawyers for a while to try to convince doctors that instead of apologizing and being transparent, they should be more defensive and think of their own self-interest. Not only was that strategy in conflict with the physician’s ethics, it also was contrary to how most people like to be treated, right? It’s much easier to sue people you don’t like than it is to sue people with whom you have good relationships. And so what the literature shows is that when physicians are honest with patients, when they actually give them thoughtful apologies and explanations about what happened, it tends to de-escalate the anger and the animus that the patients have with them, and allow them to have real dialogue about what happened.

Sadly, the piece ends with a demoralizing step backward, with health system’s Chief Risk Officer offering a “word of caution” that apology shouldn’t involve any admission of wrongdoing. “You don’t want to admit that you’ve been the cause of that situation,” she says, essentially contradicting the four previous speakers. Also contradicting the philosophy of our old friend Maimonides, who once said, “The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it.”

SorryWatch was down for techie reasons unclear to your tech-clueless hosts. It’s back now. So here are a couple of news stories we coulda-shoulda-woulda weighed in on earlier.

1. The case of Lisa Bonchek Adams, Twitter and the Kellers. The must-read summary is this one, by Zeynep Tufekci, who clearly shows that Emma and Bill Keller, in using their respective media platforms to criticize a woman named Lisa Bonchek Adams for tweeting about her Stage IV breast cancer, showed a lack of understanding of how Twitter works and a lack of Reporting 101 research. The Keller feller’s issues were semi-addressed in the NYT’s ombud column, which noted issues with “sensitivity and tone,” but didn’t go nearly far enough in pointing out the basic flaws in Keller’s journalism. Further, the headline, “Readers Lash Out About Bill Keller’s Column About a Woman With Cancer” was itself pretty slanted, making it seem that the Public Editor agrees with Keller’s perspective that the people who objected to the column were knee-jerk crazies without a deep understanding of Serious Journalism (oh wait, sorry, I meant users of Twitter, which “as a medium encourages reflexes rather than reflection,” as Keller augustly informs us).

You can go shave your back now. Bye, Bill.

Meanwhile, Lady Keller’s column was taken down from the Guardian’s web site, and the Guardian’s ombud noted that there were numerous factual errors in it. Said ombud, Chris Elliott, also noted that Lady Keller should have told Adams, who had no idea she was direct-messaging with Ladyl Keller for publication, that she was going to be quoted. Elliott noted that on January 10, Lady Keller amended her piece to say, “I have already said I regret not giving [Adams] notice about the use of her DM [Twitter direct message] where she told me that it mattered to her that there would be lasting memories about her. I continue to regret not giving her notice about the piece. In the circumstances it would have been the compassionate thing to do and Lisa deserved that.”

Elliott and other media folks have termed this an apology. It is not an apology. The phrase “I regret” is not equivalent to “I apologize.” Regret is a feeling of sadness over something that has been done. It is about self, not other. It is passive, not active. Apology, on the other hand, is about reaching out to someone else to right a wrong, actively expressing those feelings of regret and taking concrete steps to make amends. Neither Keller has apologized. This blog is called SorryWatch, not RegretWatch; if any apologies are forthcoming we’ll note them. But for now, please everyone let’s refrain from saying that Emma Keller has apologized, kthnxbai.

Someone who DID apologize well about this subject is Peggy Orenstein, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, whose first-person writing about breast cancer is a paragon of what first-person journalism is supposed to be. (IMNSHO.) In a post entitled “140 Characters Isn’t Enough to Say I’m Sorry,” she explains why she initially tweeted her support of Bill Keller’s piece, then explains where she went wrong.

I was wrong, stupid and insensitive to not read Lisa Bonchek Adams herself before promoting Bill Keller’s editorial. The internet is often a reactive place, and although I try to resist that impulse, to think before I tweet, I messed up. I hit the send button without doing the research I should have based on something in his piece that did resonate quite strongly with me —the idea that the American medical establishment prioritizes quantity over quality of life in end-of-life care. I didn’t much think about the personal example being used to make that point, just assumed he was right (and you know what happens when you assume….).

After she read Adams’s backstory and got more information, she realized she’d been precipitous. She explains her connection to Emma Keller (who was menschy to her in the past) and concludes:

I was wrong not to do my due diligence. And I apologize, again, to Lisa Adams, her followers as well as my own followers and readers for that. One of the unsettling parts of the internet is that you can’t take things back. I would have done this differently. It’s a lesson learned.

Well done. Couldn’t ask for better.

I’m sorry I laughed at you that time you got diarrhea at Barnes & Noble. And I’m sorry for telling everyone about it. And I’m sorry for repeating it now.

2. The site Grantland ran a piece about a woman scientist who invented an amazing putter. The journalist, Caleb Hannan, uncovered the fact that the inventor, called Dr. V. in the piece, was assigned male at birth. Dr. V. who was publicity-shy, hadn’t wanted to cooperate with the piece, but when Hannan promised her he’d focus entirely on her golf invention, she agreed to be interviewed. But when Hannan dug and found that Dr. V was trans, she begged him not to publish that fact; he demurred. In October, she accused him of intending to commit a hate crime, then killed herself. Grantland published the piece in January.

To its credit, the site responded quickly and thoroughly to the resulting outcry. It ran a piece from a trans sportswriter and advocate pointing out everything the story had done wrong. The site’s editor apologized in a long letter that acknowledged errors — it expressed comprehension of the sin, humanity and humility we haven’t yet seen from the Kellers. As a writer, I appreciated the way the editor, Bill Simmons, refused to throw Hannan under the bus; he took his own share of ownership. He flat-out says he and his staff should have had the piece vetted by someone with a clue about trans issues. He talks about how he pushed Hannan to dig more into Dr. V.’s history. This is good.

But there’s one screechingly terrible line in the piece: “My condolences to Dr. V’s friends and family for any pain our mistakes may have caused.” MAY HAVE? MAY HAVE? Please. This is how-not-to-apologize 101! It’s the “sorry if,” the passive voice, the “not my intent” — it’s half a Bad Apology Bingo card. (Also, “any pain”? She killed herself. Pretty sure there was some pain, dude.) Presumably the lawyers were all over that line and told Simmons not to accept responsibility for legal reasons. But if you can’t genuinely say “I’m sorry for causing Dr. V’s family and friend pain,” don’t torture that sentence into some wimpy half-assed version of itself. Cut it. You’re an editor.

There is more bad. The fact that everyone on staff is young is not an excuse for screwing up this badly. The fact that the reporter told one of Dr. V’s investors that she was trans was a huge sin, not one easily shrugged off by “he didn’t know what he was doing.” That’s not journalism; that’s making yourself a character in the story at the expense of your protagonist. Finally, Simmons or someone on staff should have picked up on Hannan’s “she’s a MAN BABY” immature Austin-Powers-y tone. The piece would still have been powerful and quirky if Hannan had reported merely that Dr. V. had falsified her academic and professional credentials, but adding that gender-gotcha, and using that ewwww-a-girlyman tone, added a whole extra bombshell level of zhuzh, and Simmons had to know it. The apology expresses that Grantland fucked up, and that’s commendable. But it still comes off as somewhat disingenuous.

There are two kinds of evil people in this world. Those who do evil stuff and those who see evil stuff being done and don’t try to stop it.

3. A person who plays the football yelled a thing at a person with a microphone after doing a thing that led to winning a game that was apparently significant. (Just imagine me wearing this shirt as I type this blog, OK?) Bellowing football person apparently said he was sorry afterward on the Twitter. (“I apologize for attacking an individual and taking the attention away from the fantastic game by my teammates. …That was not my intent.”) Here is my expert opinion: Football person did not have to apologize at all. He yelled into a microphone. The person holding the microphone was not scared or upset; she was thrilled because she knew she was getting some fabulous television. Which is her job. Afterward she told USA Today, “You expect these guys to play like maniacs and animals for 60 minutes, and then 90 seconds after he makes a career-defining, game-changing play, I’m gonna be mad because he’s not giving me a cliché answer? ‘That’s what Seahawks football is all about and that’s what we came to do and we practice for those situations’? No you don’t. That was awesome. That was so awesome. And I loved it.” [Editor’s note: I disagree with the way USA Today punctuated the quote, so I changed it, and I do not apologize, so there.]

Frankly, I can’t believe people were actually upset at this gentleman. He didn’t cheat. He didn’t play dirty. He didn’t threaten a journalist. He merely got fired up about doing his job, and doing it well, against a rival with whom he apparently has history (“a lion doesn’t concern himself about the opinions of a sheep,” he said of this rival, and hello, that is a delight of a quotation). The microphone-holding person points out that uncontrolled, un-cliche-filled braying is precisely what a reporter on the sidelines of a game dreams of. “They usually take a minute, and that’s why we grab them right after games, because we hope they lose their minds like that,” she said. “We hope he does the same thing at the Super Bowl. We don’t want a watered-down version of him.” Indeed. I am baffled. Were people upset because a large, sweaty black man was yelling in the vicinity of a young blonde woman? Are you going to make me get into semiotics of racism on this wee apology blog? Please no. Do we actually want athletes to talk to reporters the way Crash taught Nuke to respond to journalists in post-game interviews in Bull Durham? Richard Sherman, you put your head down and you play the game and God willing everything will work out. And please don’t start answering reporters’ questions like that. Because THEN we’d ask you to apologize.

UPDATE 1/24: New video shows that immediately after the play, Sherman approached Crabtree with his hand out to shake, saying “Helluva game.” Crabtree shoved him in the face mask and kept walking. Around 50 seconds later, Sherman did the bellowing interview with Erin Andrews, then returned to the field to graciously hug other opposing players. In the aftermath of all this, the Stanford-educated Sherman noted (look, a press conference in which he was mellow and used big words!) that he was perhaps over-exuberant, but hi, he was on a football field (“I wasn’t committing any crimes, doing anything illegal — I was showing passion during a football game”). He also noted that it’s telling how often he was called a thug (Deadspin noted that the word thug was uttered 625 times on American TV the day after the Seahawks’ win), pointing out, “it seems like it’s an accepted way of calling somebody the N-word now.” Agreed.

L.O.B. is like, slang…from England.

Everybody’s apologizing for the debacle that is the new healthcare.gov site! (Don’t click on that, you’ll get stuck for a week.) Health and Human Services honcho Kathleen Sebelius! (“You deserve better. I apologize. I’m accountable to you for fixing these problems. And I’m committed to earning your confidence back by fixing the site.”)

Missed it by that much.

Medicare & Medicaid macher Marilyn Tavenner! (“To the millions who have tried to use HealthCare.gov, we want to apologize to you. This initial experience has not lived up to our expectations, or the expectations of the American people, and it is not acceptable.”)

It was an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny bit of total non-functionality.

Joe Biden! (“Neither [Obama] or I are technology geeks, and we assumed it was up and ready to run. The good news is, although it’s not, and we apologize for that, we’re confident that by the end of November it will be and there will still be plenty of time for people to register online.”)

James Joyce said, “Mistakes are the portals of discovery.” See this tiny portal!

The president has not apologized — though he’s acknowledged that the launch has been problematic — because heaven forbid he look weak. As long as you’ve got lingering ill-will toward Republicans from the government shutdown on your side, you don’t want to squander it by opening yourself up to accusations that you’re an apologetic, incompetent, ineffectual weenus.

Presumably there will be more apologies as we hear more horror stories about the site, about people’s existing health plans being cancelled and about the incompetence of some of the health care “navigators.” Stay tuned.

But let’s go big-picture for a minute. Unfortunately, there’s a key element still missing from the apologies we’ve heard so far: REPARATION. For someone who claims to be accountable, Sibelius was unnervingly quick to name the government contractors and officials at other agencies who made “crucial decisions” that hobbled the web site. That doesn’t inspire confidence. And until we have a functional site, her apologies mean very little. Where’s the Change We Can Believe In?

As you know, the great sage Moses Maimonides said, “Whoever merely verbalizes his confession without consciously deciding to give up his sins is like a person who immerses in a ritual pool (mikveh) in order to cleanse himself, but is holding a dead reptile in his hand.” Sibelius is still holding the reptile. And psychiatrist Aaron Lazare, author of On Apology, wrote that the final necessary element of a good apology is making it up to people. We’re waiting.

It feels to me that in our culture there’s been a raft of apologizing without reparation. Folks with offensive Halloween costumes shouldn’t just say they’re sorry; they should tell us how they’re educating themselves about why blackface is bad, and they should volunteer for or make a donation to a cultural organization that fights bigotry. Juicing athletes should donate their winnings to sports scholarship organizations or groups that fight a winning-is-everything mentality. The words are not enough. Apology is both speech and action.

My bro-in-law Neal pointed me toward an interesting conversation on NPR’s Marketplace between superlatively named host Kai Ryssdal and Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn. Koehn, who studies the history of business, pointed out that the public is also at fault for not demanding more. (I think we have short attention spans.) (Look, a pretty flower.) “I’m not sure from whence [sic] this slow settling of not demanding accountability came from,” Koehn said. “There have been in the last 20 years examples of leaders who’ve stepped up to the plate…think of James Burke in the Tylenol crisis; think of Dave Neeleman, the CEO of JetBlue saying, ‘We didn’t create the blizzard but my goodness we’re responsible for the experience passengers had on those planes siting there on the runway.'”

Koehn stressed that “words are meaningless unless there’s a consequence.” She concluded, “We don’t — as citizens, consumers, voters, members of communities — demand something better of our very prominent officials and leaders.”

But I don’t know how demanding accountability would actually work, other than voting politicians out of office and pressuring corporate boards to fire CEOs. How do we stop cheating in sports when we demand superhuman performance from our athletes? How do we make idiot celebs turn their idiocy into meaningful social action? You tell me. I understand the words part of the puzzle — it’s the lasting-change part that’s harder for me to wrap my brain around.

I’m swivel-eyed, but I’m not slimy.

(This is basic. To keep it brief, I’m omitting countless variations and dodges. And the part about maybe making it up to them.)

APOLOGIZE – Say “I’m sorry” or “I apologize.” Take responsibility. Talk about what you did, not just “what happened.” Avoid “if,” “regret,” and “it’s unfortunate.” Try “I shouldn’t have done that,” “That was rude of me,” or “It was wrong.”

TO THEM – Not just to the twitmosphere, but to the person harmed.

FOR WHAT YOU DID – Be specific. Not “hurting you” but, for example, “calling you a slimy swivel-eyed creep.”

ACKNOWLEDGE THE EFFECT – If you know it. “I embarrassed you by calling you a slimy swivel-eyed creep in front of everybody at our dinner table, and at the nearby tables.”

EXPLAIN, BUT DON’T EXCUSE – “I called you a slimy swivel-eyed creep to try to make you be quiet because I didn’t want to be thrown out before dessert came. I was a jerk.”

I’m slimy, but I wouldn’t call myself swivel-eyed.

STOP TALKING AND LET THEM HAVE THEIR SAY – “I wasn’t upset that you called me a slimy swivel-eyed creep. I was upset that you interrupted my song. It made me feel like you don’t respect me as an artist.”

Got it?

Apologize

To them

For what you did

Acknowledge the effect

Explain but don’t excuse

Let them have their say

It’s not complicated. You can do this!

I am slimy AND swivel-eyed & the ladies love my tune: “Itz Just That EZ (don’t roll ur ize @ me).

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Thank you, everyone who emailed, Facebooked and Tweeted us the NPR story on the psychological benefits of NOT apologizing. As is so often the case, the study in question is far more nuanced than the grabby headline (“Why Not Apologizing Makes You Feel Better”) might lead you to believe.

The NPR story does say early on that “there is abundant research on the psychological value of apologizing.” (Semi-inexplicably, NPR’s link is to a site about post-apartheid reparations in South Africa rather than another study about apology research with citations…but never fear, I shall provide some for you! Keep reading!)

The study in the NPR story is small (288 participants) but smart. Let us evaluate it. It points out that there’s a lot of research on apologizing and not much on not apologizing — so we do have a data gap. This is one study, and good science is built on a multitude of studies. There’s also a methodological issue at play here: How do you figure out if someone who doesn’t apologize would feel better if he or she did apologize? We can’t know for sure the effects of a thing that didn’t happen. Finally, a study that necessarily depends on self-reported data about feelings is inherently thorny. People are very good at self-justification, and tend to say that the choices they’ve made are the right ones. The study’s three Aussie authors — Tyler Okimoto of the University of Queensland Business School in Brisbane, Michael Wenzel of the Flingers University School of Psychology in Adelaide, and Kyli Hedrick of the Victoria University School of Social Sciences and Psychology in Melbourne — put it  in  fancypants academic language:

Paradoxically, a “refusal'” to apologize may also offer the same psychological value to a harm-doer. Refusing to admit to a wrong helps to maintain consistency between the harm-doer’s actions and his or her idealized self-concept. Indeed, people are often motivated toward self-consistency even when the resulting attribution is negative (Lecky, 1945). Thus, even though defending a negative behavior may insinuate a less benevolent character, the act of refusing to apologize may still help facilitate perceptions of self-consistency, reducing self-oriented dissonance and enhancing feelings of value integrity.

None of this means the study is bad. It’s just important that our takeaway isn’t HA HA I DO NOT HAVE TO APOLOGIZE AND I WILL FEEL NIFTY.

So here’s what our intrepid authors actually found: A big difference between apologizers and non-apologizers is that (der) apologizers tended to feel more sorry than non-apologizers, but non-apologizers tended to feel more power, control and “value integrity” (the sense of being true to themselves). Wisely, the authors point out that there’s a difference between failing to apologize and refusing to apologize — we may feel regret for not apologizing when we know we’ve done wrong and have been passive or wimpy or fearful about saying no or missing the window of opportunity to right a wrong, but we’re less likely to feel that way when we’ve made a conscious choice not to say we’re sorry. So convincing yourself that HA HA I DO NOT HAVE TO APOLOGIZE AND I WILL FEEL NIFTY may not help you feel nifty at all if you really are sorry but are having a hard time being facing up to your guilt. It’s not easy to be brave, to be conciliatory to your victim, a person who may reject your apology. Finally, we need more research on whether not apologizing for legal reasons — because you’re worried how a judge or jury will assess your culpability — affects your sense of self.

There is a bunch of research showing that apologizing is better than not apologizing.  One study found that bankrupcy judges gave more favorable rulings to debtors who apologized than those who didn’t. Another found that when an accused wrongdoer apologized in court, juries were less likely to return a finding of negligence. “We know victims often respond favorably to an apology, but our findings suggest that even unharmed jurors react in a similar manner,” said one of the latter study’s authors, Robert Cornell of Oklahoma State, in a OSU press release. “Offering an apology though is not synonymous with admitting guilt.” (Here’s a compilation of evidence that, as Cornell said, victims respond favorably to apology.)

OK, but those studies are about apologies’ effects on the victim, not on the perp, right? Right. But we know from other studies (a bunch are cited here, and we’ll go into the nitty-gritty of some in another post) that feeling guilt (as opposed to shame, which can make us shut down instead of reaching out) and seeking forgiveness can help mend relationships. People with a pro-social orientation tend to be healthier, more connected to others and less stressed than those without such an orientation. Rest assured we’ll post more about this in the future.