A crucial element of a good apology is understanding the difference between explanation and excuse. Many of us mess this up. An explanation offers context that’s helpful to the person receiving the apology; an excuse offers context that’s designed to make the person who is putatively apologizing look less guilty.

A kind SorryWatch reader sent us this letter from 1890 (EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND NINETY!), showing that even way back before there was social media, a prominent personage understood the difference between explanation and excuse. We don’t have the full text of the letter, so we’re not sure if the fellow used the words “I’m sorry” or “I apologize,” but the part of the letter we DO have is a perfect example of taking responsibility. Check it out.

In November 1890, the British journal Knowledge: A Monthly Record of Science ran a review of an astronomy textbook by Charles A. Young, professor of astronomy at the College of New Jersey (renamed Princeton University six years later). The review was largely favorable, though it took issue, as one does, with the section on meteoric debris. The unnamed reviewer also had concerns about Young’s discussion of the sun. Which was “treated…very meagrely”! JEEZ, Professor Young, what about the polarized light of the corona?? Or the connection between the corona and the development of sun spots?! AND, the review noted, there’s only one picture of a corona, “and that is wrongly oriented. It has its northern pole where its eastern equatorial region ought to be.” Gotcha!

The review noted, with some condescension toward the former colonies: “With all the advances that America has made, authors have more to contend with in the land of Franklin than they have here. The number of printer’s errors must have been very annoying to Professor Young.” PITY about the United States’s substandard printers.

 

 

Nevertheless, the review concluded, “Professor Young is an accomplished practical astronomer, and a teacher of great experience, as well as a popular exponent of science in lucid and simple language. He is also a man of wide reading, and the combination has given us an astronomical text-book of exceptional value.”

Professor Young responded to the review with a letter in the next issue of Knowledge:

To the Editor of Knowledge:

….There is just one thing in the critique which I want to ask you to correct, because it does an injustice to others. My printers were to blame for only a very small proportion of the errata that occurred in the book. For most of them I am myself responsible. The preparation of the last half of the book (after p. 200) and the proofreading of the whole was done by me in a time of great distress (owing to my son’s illness); and though I do not plead this circumstance as an excuse, it is an explanation, at least in part. I really wish you would take occasion to say editorially that “whatever blame may attach to the numerous errata in Prof. Young’s General Astronomy belongs almost entirely to himself, and not to the printers,” or something to that effect…. C. A. Young

A.C. Ranyard, Knowledge‘s editor, noted that Young’s son had been gravely injured by an electrical shock, which surely was a distraction for him at the time. Ranyard noted, “We are now so widely welcoming the Dangerous Demon of Electricity, that the accident to this promising young electrician (whom I remember as an Eclipse observer in Colorado in 1878) cannot be too widely used as a warning.” Indeed.

Further, Ranyard observed that the November 1890 edition of Knowledge might not have been the place to snark at American printers. “Our last number was not a fortunate one in which to allude to the mistakes of American printers,” he wrote. “It contained a good many printers’ errors – probably due to the fact that it was the first number printed by fresh printers.” MMMKAY.

Young’s attempt to make sure the printers weren’t held responsible for his mistakes reminds us of NASA launch manager Wayne Hale wanting to be sure that the factory workers who’d installed the foam insulation on the Space Shuttle Columbia weren’t blamed for the foam’s cracking. Taking responsibility for errors is a hallmark of good leadership.

And Professor Young sounds like a good egg in general: unpretentious, eager to popularize science, willing to admit when he was wrong—professionally as well as personally. A 1909 obituary in Astrophysical Journal noted, “To those who missed the opportunity of knowing him, it may be said that he was thoroughly infused with the true scientific spirit—ever ready to modify theory to accord with newly discovered facts, and to accept the revision of what were once the best facts available as new information was obtained by experiment and observation. He was entirely free from the dogmatism that often grows upon men with an enlarging reputation as authorities upon a subject. His modesty, even humility…was a true characteristic of his greatness.”

Young left academic life in 1862 to fight for the Union in the Civil War, an experience that had a longterm impact on his health. When he returned to teach at Dartmouth, he made time to lecture at women’s colleges as well (Dartmouth was, of course, all male), and despite his growing international scientific stature, he regularly contributed to Popular Science magazine. He even wrote occasional science articles for New York newspapers, which “did not at that time crave sensational articles so much as now,” the obituary in Astrophysical Journal helpfully noted. (The obit added that “probably the financial stress, so familiar in the experience of college teachers, was also a partial motive for some of these contributions.”) Even his most scholarly work was written accessibly, “in such a simple and interesting manner as to attract and hold the intelligent general reader.” He was a man of strong Christian faith (he’d even attended seminary school before choosing to focus on astronomy) but “there was not to him any serious antagonism between the fundamentals of science and of religion,” the obit said. “This position gave him considerable influence among those having to do with theological instruction; and, on the other hand, it had its useful effect upon his many college students, who had for him only the highest respect.” His students also liked the fact that his lectures “were enlivened by a quaint humor” and that he learned every student’s name, even in his large lecture classes, which brimmed with students “attracted probably more by the teacher than by the subject.”

In short, he sounds like the kind of guy who’d be generous to admit that he wrong when presented with new data. Who’d take responsibility for his mistakes. Who wouldn’t throw the people who printed his books under the bus.

Be like Charles.

Conventional wisdom holds that apologies make you look weak. Our last president resolutely refused to apologize for anything for four years. Americans love to mock Canadian and British people for their lily-livered, knee-jerk, obsessive apologizing. (Here, we’ll do it: “Oh gosh, that moose ate your Timbit, sorry!” and “Pip pip cheerio, terribly sorry someone drove a lorry full of chips into the lift! Arsenal! Tottenham Hotspur!”)

Women are constantly informed by people who have not researched apology that they apologize too much. Charts on the Internet suggest multiple things to say in multiple situations instead of “I’m sorry.”

But what if everybody’s wrong?

A 2013 study called “I’m Sorry About the Rain! Superfluous Apologies Demonstrate Empathic Concern and Increase Trust,” published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, found that when you apologize for stuff you’re not responsible for — the weather, the traffic, the fact that Tim Horton’s was out of the maple dip — you create a connection with the person you’re apologizing to. Such “superfluous apologies” display empathy, and empathy has a positive impact on relationships.

When Bill Clinton, once seen as our most empathetic president (though nowadays the 1993 headline in The Onion, “New President Feels Nation’s Pain, Breasts” seems more resonant) said, “I’m sorry about the rain” to an audience awaiting his speech, he communicated that he understood their perspective (dampness!), that he recognized the adversity they were coping with, that he was attuned to and thinking about their feelings and experiences.

The study’s authors (Alison Wood Brooks, a professor at Harvard Business School; Hengchen Dai, now an assistant professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management; and Maurice E. Schweitzer, a professor at the Wharton School of Business) note that previous business-related research showed that negotiators who express regret or guilt tend to be better liked than negotiators who don’t. The authors suspected that people who apologize are better liked “even in the absence of culpability,” so they designed four little studies to prove it.

Study 1: Paid volunteers were recruited to play what the researchers called a “trust game.” The subject would be given $6; they could decide to keep or give to an invisible partner in another room. If they gave the money away, the researchers would triple the sum (to $18) and the hidden partner could choose to either keep all the money or give half of it ($9) back to the subject. But there was a TWIST! The researchers informed the subjects that there was also a computer that could opt to override the partner’s decisions, whatever they were. (In reality, there was no partner and no computer, because researchers are lying liars who lie.) The study found that when the “computer” supposedly overruled the partner and deprived the subject of money, if the partner said, “I’m really sorry the computer changed my choice,” this superfluous apology “increased perceptions of benevolence-based trust.” The subject was more likely to try giving their money to the counterpart again. Not only did the subject trust the counterpart more, but they also rated them more likable.

Study 2: Subjects were asked to imagine that they were waiting for a flight and there was an announcement that the flight was delayed. If someone approached them and said one of three things: “Hi — I’m sorry your flight was delayed; can I borrow your cell phone?” or “Hi – I’m sorry to interrupt; can I borrow your cell phone?” or “Hi – can I borrow your cell phone?” how likely were they to lend the person their phone? Study participants trusted the would-be phone borrower more if the asker offered the first apology (the superfluous apology) than if they gave the second apology (the “traditional apology”) or failed to apologize at all.

Study 3: Participants were asked to imagine they were going to meet a Craigslist seller to buy a used iPod (ahahahahahahaha 2013 study, what even is an iPod) and it was raining. If the seller greeted them with “Hi there, oh, I’m so sorry it’s raining,” the buyer found the seller more trustworthy, more competent and more likeable than a seller who said either “Hi there, oh, it’s raining” or just “Hi there.”

Study 4: The researchers physically sent an actual confederate who didn’t know what the study was about to an actual train station in the actual annoying rain to ask to borrow people’s cell phones. Only 28 percent of the people asked were willing to hand over their phones. Among them, 47% of those who got a superfluous apology (“I’m so sorry about the rain! Can I borrow your cell phone?”) loaned their phone, vs. only 9% of the people who got no superfluous apology (“Can I borrow your cell phone?”).

 

Snarly particularly likes this study because the authors acknowledge that there is research showing gender differences in the way apologies are perceived. Apologizing may have different impacts depending on whether men or women do it! And being likeable because you apologize may be nice, but what if it means you’re also perceived as less powerful? What if apologizing, for women, means damaging your perceived power, control, and competence, as other studies have noted? The researchers looked at gender in their four studies, and in this case, they explicitly note, there were no gender differences in how superfluous apologies were perceived. (We’d observe that in this paper, the apologizer apologizes only once per experiment. Repeated, frequent apologies have a different impact. More research is needed, as ever.)

Look, the power of a superfluous apology is that it says, “I see you.” This is why we say, “Sorry for your loss,” even if we didn’t kill the person’s grandmother. This is why, while writing this post, when Snarly received a text from her child reporting that they felt sick and puked on the camp bus, Snarly reflexively replied, “I’m so sorry” even though she didn’t make the child eat all those cherries.

Making the effort to put ourselves in another person’s place, taking time to look at the world as the other person sees it, striving to be kind and generous rather than brusque or entitled…this is how we build the world we want to live in. Good apologies — and as we see here, sometimes even superfluous apologies — are a small step toward creating this world.

Life is just a bowl of cherries. Enjoy in moderation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One half of Team SorryWatch is now off in the desert, perhaps with no pants on, perhaps not. (This was a reference to one of our most popular posts, in which Sumac reported about a camp at Burning Man that specialized in helping people apologize. It’s a great post; read it if you haven’t.) The tragic, left-behind non-Burner therefore decided to take her mind off her loneliness by compiling a roundup of recent apology research.

Let’s begin with the work of Oberlin psychology professor Cindy Frantz. Prompted by a student, she ran studies determining that yes, there is such a thing as a “too-early apology.” A precipitous apology “can make the victim feel like the perpetrator did not take the time to understand their perspective and therefore doesn’t understand what they did wrong.” So rather than leaping into the discomfort/reaction-to-criticism breach, take some time to ponder why the other person is so hurt or angry. Educate yourself, ask questions, listen, and then apologize once you’ve truly understood the impact of your actions. Celebrities and politicians often screw this up. “For an apology to be effective, the perpetrator has to understand the victim’s worldview and experience,” Frantz told Williams Magazine. “That’s where my work on too-early apologies informs my understanding of public apologies—the central theme here is the perpetrator’s ability (or inability) to take the victim’s perspective.” (How long is optimal to wait before apologizing? ALAS. More research is needed.)

Moving on, here’s an interesting look at the impact of apologies in social rejections. It was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology by researchers at Dartmouth and UT Austin. Let’s say you’ve just turned down a request to go out for drinks, or told a colleague you’d prefer not to work on a project together. Should you apologize? Surprisingly, probably not. Lead author Gili Freedman and her colleagues note that “apologies may backfire within a social rejection because they may make targets feel compelled to express forgiveness without actually making targets feel forgiveness and may make the target feel the rejector is not sincere.” In other words, when you apologize, the other person feels pressure to say “that’s okay”…even if IT IS NOT. “Social norms dictate that we forgive someone if they apologize,” Freedman et al write. “Therefore, targets are put in a position where they are expected to forgive the rejection even if they do not believe the apology is sincere.”

You should probably read this paper because it includes the phrase “participants allocated more hot sauce” (metaphorical hot sauce! to be theoretically ingested, punitively, by the person who socially rejected the participant in an experiment!) and “A Hurt Feelings score was computed.” Snarly is personally computing her Hurt Feelings score at all times. Check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Another fun finding in this study: Social rejections with apologies were felt to be less sincere than social rejections without apologies. And perhaps ironically, the rejector becomes LESS likely to actually be forgiven than if they hadn’t apologized at all.

The study also notes that sometimes people who apologize aren’t interested in real forgiveness. Sometimes they just want to feel better themselves (“I said I was sorry, whew, all good!”), and sometimes, in Freedman and company’s words, they “may just want the quickest solution (i.e., the most efficient form of rejection).” The authors also note, dovetailing with Frantz’s research, that more time between the social rejection and the reaction might change the outcomes.

Finally, there’s the question of wording. Does it matter if you apologize first, then give the social rejection, or if you give the social rejection, and then apologize for it? We need MOAR RESEARCH! But there are hints! Researchers in the business realm have found that when you’re writing a “nope” letter to a job applicant, it’s better to put the rejection right up front, so that the applicant immediately knows what’s what. “Previously, letter writers were cautioned to begin with a positive statement (i.e., a buffer), but research on buffers found that rejected applicants were more upset because they were then surprised by the rejection after reading something positive.” Thus: We regret to inform you that you suck.

More research on apologies and power (does being powerful make your apology more or less likely to be accepted?) in another post.

PS. Snarly truthfully did not want to go to Burning Man. It has dirt. She makes no apologies.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tim Hunt is a biochemist, co-winner of a Nobel Prize in the Physiology or Medicine category (along with Leland Hartwell and Paul Nurse). The prize was for work elucidating how proteins like cyclins control cell division. Sounds like he can be a smart person when he focuses.

At a conference of science journalists in South Korea, he agreed to make some remarks “at short notice” to some women journalists. At a lunch honoring women in science. He joked about the fact that he was speaking after three women had spoken. (An example of the joke-like form: it’s shaped like a joke but may not actually contain humor.)

He spoke about female scientists in the laboratory. “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry.”

According to journalist Connie St Louis, in the audience, this did not go over as “light-hearted, ironic” wit. “Nobody was laughing, everybody was stony-faced.”

St Louis tweeted Hunt’s remarks to a wider audience. There was more failure-to-appreciate, of an angry nature. And a stunned nature. “I was gobsmacked,” said Ivan Oransky, of the ever-readable Retraction Watch. The BBC Radio Four’s Today program asked Hunt about it. He explained:

I’m really sorry that I said what I said. It was a very stupid thing to do in the presence of all those journalists. And what was intended as sort of a light-hearted ironic comment apparently was interpreted deadly seriously by my audience. But what I said was quite accurately reported. It’s terribly important that you can criticize people’s ideas without criticizing them and if they burst into tears, it means that you tend to hold back from getting at the absolute truth. I mean what – science is about nothing but getting at the truth and anything that gets in the way of that diminishes, in my experience, the science.

And:

I did mean the part about having trouble with girls. I mean it is true that people—I have fallen in love with people in the lab and people in the lab have fallen in love with me and it’s very disruptive to the science because it’s terribly important that in a lab people are sort of on a level playing field. And found that, you know, these emotional entanglements made life very difficult. I mean I’m really, really sorry I caused any offense, that’s awful. I certainly didn’t mean – I just meant to be honest, actually.

Yes, that’s a bad apology. He’s sorry because he got caught. He was just joking around! His apology is for other people’s reactions – their too-serious, uncomprehending, anti-science reactions – and not for anything he said. Add it up: lack of remorse, minimizing, sorry-if, failure to think.

What about what he said? It has two parts: romance is dangerous in labs, and women – “girls” – cry and don’t grasp that you might be criticizing their ideas and not them. You can’t work with the sniffly fools.

Even Hunt sees that falling in love goes both ways. The trouble is as much boys in the lab as it is girls in the lab. Those crazy kids!

The Guardian reports that Hunt is “in favour of single-sex labs.” Because he doesn’t want to “stand in the way of women.” Let girls have their own soggy laboratories. Is Hunt actually unaware that not everyone in the world is heterosexual, and that single-sex institutions also have sex and romantic issues? You know, I bet he knows that. He just hasn’t thought it through. I CRITICIZE HIM.

Wikipedia mentions that Hunt worked with Ellie Ehrenfeld and Nechama Kosower and Edward Kosower among others in Irving London’s lab. I have no way of knowing whether he or anyone else had romantic problems centered on Ehrenfeld’s presence. Whether he or anyone else had romantic problems centered on London’s presence. Ditto Nechama Kosower. Ditto Edward Kosower. But his argument for single-sex labs suggests that Ehrenfeld and Nechama Kosower should have left to form their own lab. Maybe then, free of distraction, some of them could have discovered how glutathione inhibits protein synthesis in reticulocytes and small amounts of RNA stop it entirely. OH WAIT, they discovered that ANYWAY. No doubt amidst FLOODS OF TEARS though.

Hunt says that when a woman scientist’s ideas are criticized, she cries. Must happen sometimes. Not true it always happens, but what if it were? The critic (assumed to be male?), says an idea is flawed. The woman scientist weeps. Now the critic holds back, frightened of potential weeping. WE FEAR THE TEARS! Science is diminished.

Hunt’s solution: keep women out. Let them start their own labs. But who is the problem – those who shed tears or those who fear tears? My solution: say what needs to be said regardless of crying or possible crying. Butch up, bunky.

There’s Hunt, smart person, saying stupid things. (No, they were not just stupid to say in front of journalists. They were independently stupid.) I’ve met some very smart people (including, but not limited to, Nobelists and Kyoto Prize winners). Often they turn their intelligence on things outside their main areas of focus. Sometimes they have intelligent things to say about that stuff. Sometimes they have dumb things to say. It’s as if they didn’t have time to think deeply about everything in the world.

Many times smart people are dumb about ordinary human affairs. They don’t think they need to explore this stuff. They may think they know it just because they’re human. Sadly, it’s not that simple. Being a human doesn’t mean you’re smart about being a human. Having gender doesn’t mean you’re intelligent about gender. Being a scientist who has fallen in love and been fallen in love with doesn’t mean you have the tiniest clue in the world about gender segregation in laboratories. As we see.

Unfortunately, being a scientist of Hunt’s accomplishment and stature means he can influence the careers of women scientists. He can keep “girls” out of his lab, where they will cause trouble. He can advise others to do so.

Until now. Hunt foolishly came clean about his views before an outraged audience who told the world. This may spur change. Thanks, science journalists.

Warning. I am crankier than usual right now. I’m still in a fury about serial domestic violence perpetrator Floyd Mayweather being protected by the entire city of Las Vegas and getting paid a gazillion dollars to beat someone up (at least that guy signed on for it) as well as about the general state of our planet, but I have 20 minutes before I have to meet my mom to see The Gentlemen’s Guide to Love and Murder (FITTING); so I thought I’d tackle this vile wee bit o’ sexism covered by our pals at Retraction Watch and tipped to us by Sorrywatch reader/technical writer/martial arts badass/music writer Lisa Hirsch.

Fiona Ingleby and Megan Head, postdocs in evolutionary genetics at the University of Sussex and the Australian National University, respectively, co-wrote an article on gender differences. They looked at data about newly minted PhDs and the correlations between their publication rates and the amount of time it took to find postdoc jobs…and found that (SHOCKER) men had a significantly easier time. The two submitted their paper to a scientific journal published by PLOS (Public Library of Science).

Ingleby tweeted about what happened next. Read the whole pathetic saga over at RetractionWatch…but here are the highlights.

1. One of the paper’s peer reviewers suggested that the scientists find a couple of dude biologists “to serve as a possible check against interpretations that may sometimes be drifting too far away from empirical evidence into ideologically based assumptions.” (Ingleby and Head were looking at survey data. Pure numbers. In general I’m a believer in “show me the results you want and I’ll design a study to find them,” but in this case, the two didn’t design a study: They merely reported numbers and results from widely available data.) The reviewer also suggested they get a guy’s name on the paper to improve it.

2. The reviewer helpfully pointed out that male doctoral students publish in better journals and work longer hours because of their “marginally better health and stamina.”Like Captain America, post-serum. Also, they can “probably run a mile race faster than female doctoral students.” IT’S JUST SCIENCE.

3. On April 29, after Ingleby’s tweets and Retraction Watch’s coverage, David Knutson, PR man of PLOS, left a comment at Retraction Watch:

PLOS regrets the tone, spirit and content of this particular review. We take peer review seriously and are diligently and expeditiously looking into this matter. The appeal is in process. PLOS allows Academic Editors autonomy in how they handle manuscripts, but we always follow up if concerns are raised at any stage of the process. Our appeals policy also means that any complaints of the review process can be fully addressed and the author given opportunity to have their paper re-reviewed.

Not an apology. Twitter observations included:

PLOS also tweeted at Ingleby:

Mmm, nope. As we have discussed many times on this site, “regret” is not “apology.” Regret is about the speaker’s feelings; apology is about the listener’s feelings.

4. The next day The Times Higher Education outed the journal as PLOS ONE, and having gotten hold of the review itself, quoted it thusly: “the qulaity [sic] of the manuscript is por [sic] issues on methodologies and presentation of resulst [sic].” (There’s SO MUCH MORE where that came from, including the suggestion that ladies just don’t TRY as hard as the menfolk, so do head to THE if you have a Xanax on hand, but we’re in this for the apology, so let’s move on.)

5. Knutson followed up again in another comment to Retraction Watch:

There has been a lot of talk about peer review in general, with some questions raised about single-blind review on Retraction Watch and other venues.  We have been asked why PLOS ONE uses a single-blind system and whether we’ll consider other peer review systems in the future.

PLOS ONE currently use single-blind review, and feels that cases such as this highlight the flaws in such a system. We believe the answer lies not in making the process even more closed, such as by using double-blind review, but by opening it up and making it more transparent. We are currently exploring a system on PLOS ONE, with an opt-out feature, whereby reviewers’ identities are made available to authors, and reviews posted alongside papers.

In other words, having two reviewers (which one of the paper’s co-authors tweeted was a good idea in general) is NOT A GOOD IDEA! It’s even more covert! (Wait, what?) But you can have the chance to know who dinged you, maybe? I’m unclear on WHO gets the opt-out feature — the reviewer or the author, but I am just a girl of very little brain.

6. AND FINALLY (we think) the editorial director of PLOS ONE weighed in on PLOS’s blog. According to Damian Pattinson, the manuscript is now being re-reviewed by a different editor, and “[w]e have also asked the Academic Editor who handled the manuscript to step down from the Editorial Board and we have removed the referee from our reviewer database.”

AND HERE IS THE APOLOGY! Thank you for reading along this far!

I want to sincerely apologize for the distress the report caused the authors, and to make clear that we completely oppose the sentiments it expressed. We are reviewing our processes to ensure that future authors are given a fair and unprejudiced review. As part of this, we are working on new features to make the review process more open and transparent, since evidence suggests that review is more constructive and civil when the reviewers’ identities are known to the authors (Walsh et al., 2000). This work has been ongoing for some months at PLOS ONE, and we will be announcing more details on these offerings soon.

Adequate. An excellent apology would not apologize for the “distress the report caused the authors.” It would apologize for the actions of PLOS ONE. And it would apologize to all humans, not just Ingleby and Head. Female scientist humans are only one segment of the populace hurt by sexism and bias. SCIENCE is also hurt by sexism and bias.

The best apologies own the wrongdoing, name and describe with precision what the wrongful action was, acknowledge the damage done, discuss the “why” and explain the steps taken to be sure it won’t happen again. In many cases, reparations are also called for.  PLOS ONE gets about a B-/C+ here.

A note: The use of “civil” twice in Pattinson’s post (read the whole thing here) is interesting. Ingleby and Head were utterly civil. Ingleby only turned to Twitter after not hearing from PLOS ONE for weeks after she and her co-writer appealed the decision. At no point was there name-calling. The reviewer was also civil. (Blithely sexist, offensive, clueless, biased and in possession of few English spelling or grammar gifts, but civil!) Many Twitter comments, however, were snarky and mocking. I suspect Pattinson’s repeated use of “civil” was an indication of how he felt about PLOS ONE being lambasted in social media. Well, cry me a river — a river like the tears of hysterical women and the plague of gushing menstrual blood upon which their academic work apparently flows.

 

The news is making me so sad right now. We have any number of terrible apologies we could talk about, but instead, can we focus on a good one? (I realize we’ve had a lot of good apologies on the site lately. I DO NOT APOLOGIZE.)

This lovely apology is from Letters of Note, a delightful web site (and now a gorgeously published, oversized, heavy-papered, art-filled thick book) by Shaun Usher that looks at “fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos” — often with scans and photos of the letters in question. (The book features new content as well as posts from the site.)

This delightful letter was sent to the Royal Australian Air Force’s Rocket Range at Woomera.

Fifty two (52) years later, Denis got a reply. It begins with a fine apology for tardiness.

Australian Government
Department of Defence
Defence Science and
Technology Organisation

Mr Denis Cox

28/8/09

Dear Mr Cox, 

I would like to thank you for your letter we received on 20th Oct. 1957 regarding the design of your rocketship. I apologise for the late response to your letters. You will appreciate, that as you requested “A Top Scientist” that uses the “WOOMERA ROCKET RANGE” it took a little while for your letter to get to me and in addition, it took some time to provide due consideration to your ideas. 

Go read the whole charming reply at Letters of Note. Here’s the conclusion: 

I remember as a boy designing rocket ships and planes at about the same time that you wrote your letter. I don’t know why or how, but somehow I was lucky enough to get to a position where I now head a team that designs planes and engines that will soon fly at Mach 8, or around 9000km/hr. I am proud to tell you that these planes will have an “AUSTRALIAN MARKING” on them as you indicated they should have. My one hope is that we do a sufficiently good job that is worthy of the inspiration, dreams and hopes that you provided in your letter those many years ago. 

Once again, thank you for your letter. 

(Signed)

Allan Paul BSc PhD MEngSc
Research Leader Applied Hypersonics
Air Vehicles Division
DSTO-Brisbane

Thank you, nice scientists (and authors and artists and public servants) who write back to children. Even belatedly.

 

Charles Darwin was very intelligent, thoughtful, and hardworking. And a big worrier.

One thing he worried about was how people would respond to his theory of evolution by natural selection. He knew people would fuss about it. They would say he was wrong, stupid, and bad. He worried that a whole lot of people could be a whole lot of angry. Perhaps he sensed that bumper stickers might ensue.

The idea first really came to him in 1838 when he read Malthus on population. He worked on it for decades, always worried that he wasn’t ready for publication. Instead he published about the voyage of the Beagle, about collections he’d made on that voyage, about geology, about coral reefs, and more. Plus he had a life.

Decades went by, and it always seemed there was more research to be done on natural selection before he could proceed. He wanted all his ducks in a row. (No, more ducks. Straighter row. Bigger ducks. They need to be… duckier.) He only showed bits of his work to a few reliable friends, like geologist Charles Lyell and botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker. They said he should publish. He worried he didn’t have enough yet. He complained to Lyell, “every proposition requires such an array of facts.”

Because of his other work, Darwin was highly regarded. People wrote to him and sent him specimens. One of the people who wrote to him was Alfred Russell Wallace, who was off in the Malay Archipelago, botanizing and biologizing and biogeographizing. Wallace sent Darwin bird specimens, and a paper he’d written about the “Sarawak Law.” Passing on a compliment, Darwin told Wallace that Lyell had liked another paper of Wallace’s.

In June 1858, Darwin got a letter from Wallace which filled him with despair. It included the manuscript of an essay which Wallace asked Darwin to look at and send to Lyell. In relatively few words it described the theory of evolution by natural selection.

AUGH!

Darwin miserably sent it to Lyell, saying “Your words have come true with a vengeance that I should be forestalled” [if he didn’t publish]. …all my originality… will be smashed.”

Lyell consulted Hooker and the two famously came up with a plan to present Wallace’s and Darwin’s work jointly at a meeting of the Linnean Society. They published Wallace’s essay along with extracts from an essay Darwin had written but not published in 1844. Darwin worried about whether it was the honorable thing to do, but they talked Darwin into it. One of his children was dying, and he couldn’t pay much attention to anything else. Wallace, far in the Malay Archipelago, was not consulted.

Hooker wrote Wallace a letter, explaining the whole thing. Darwin sent it to Wallace, along with a letter of his own. It took four months for the letters to get to Wallace.

It is a melancholy thing for students of tact, and for busybodies, that these letters do not survive. Darwin told Hooker his letter was “perfect, quite clear & most courteous.” Was there any apology? Probably not, but we don’t know. Whatever they wrote, Wallace took it well. His letter to Darwin is also lost, though his letter to Hooker exists. He said he was gratified, found their procedure “strictly just” and that he felt favored to have his work recognized with Darwin’s, and that he would have hated it if Darwin had in an “excess of generosity” published Wallace’s essay without his own.

Wallace and Darwin resumed corresponding about honeycomb structure, birds’ nests, and stripes in horses and donkeys. Wallace wrote to his mother and to a naturalist friend, gloating over his publication and the nice things Lyell and Hooker had said about his work.

Hooker and Lyell now insisted that Darwin finish and publish his book on natural selection, even if his ducks were unruly. It came out at the end of 1859.

In the resultant furore, a few others popped up to say Hey! I thought of that ages ago! What’s the big dealie-hoo? Do I get a prize?

Patrick Matthew, a naturalist and political writer, made a public fuss about the fact that he had published a description of natural selection way back in 1831. He wrote indignantly to the Gardeners’ Chronicle claiming he had been first.

It was true.

Darwin replied via the Gardeners’ Chronicle:

I freely acknowledge that Mr. Matthew has anticipated by many years the explanation which I have offered of the origin of species, under the name of natural selection. I think that no one will feel surprised that neither I, nor apparently any other naturalist, has heard of Mr. Matthew’s views, considering how briefly they are given, and that they appeared in the Appendix to a work on Naval Timber and Arboriculture. I can do no more than offer my apologies to Mr. Matthew for my entire ignorance of his publication. If another edition of my work is called for, I will insert a notice to the foregoing effect.

As Stephen Jay Gould described, Matthew wrote back that he hadn’t promoted his idea more because it seemed so obvious. Poor plodding Darwin had to puzzle it out, duck by duck, “while with me it was by a general glance at the scheme of Nature that I estimated this select production of species as an a priori recognizable fact—an axiom, requiring only to be pointed out to be admitted by unprejudiced minds of sufficient grasp.”

(Tell me about it. I thought plate tectonics was so obvious I never bothered to bring it up. I mean, look at South America and Africa, duh. I was a child of seven, so of course I never published. I did tell Amy.)

Matthew had the words “Discoverer of the Principle of Natural Selection” put on the title page of a revised edition of Naval Timber and Arboriculture. (Naval timber is wood suitable for shipbuilding.)

Biographer Janet Browne notes that a doctor turned out to have written an essay outlining natural selection in 1818, and to have buried it in a larger work called Essay on Dew. (Dew! Damn! Dew! Why didn’t I think of that?)

Darwin’s apology to Matthew is good. He acknowledges Matthew’s priority, gives a believable explanation of why he hadn’t heard of it, and offers to make amends in future editions. (Which he did.) Okay, the part about how absolutely nobody read the goddamned appendix, of all things, to a goddamned book on – excuse me? – naval timber does seem like a dig. But it’s true.

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.”

We here at SorryWatch want to exalt the good, not just excoriate the bad. Here’s an apology that’s very, very good.

N. Wayne Hale was the launch integration manager at NASA in 2003, when the space shuttle Columbia exploded. After the disaster, he emailed the entire shuttle team, then made the email public. 

(You can find the text online, but I’m quoting from the wonderful book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson.) Even though Hale actually had raised red flags before launch, he took full responsibility.

I had the opportunity and the information and I failed to make use of it. I don’t know what an inquest or a court of law would say, but I stand condemned in the court of my own conscience to be guilty of not preventing the Columbia disaster. We could discuss the particulars: inattention, incompetence, distraction, lack of conviction, lack of understanding, a lack of backbone, laziness. The bottom line is that I failed to understand what I was being told; I failed to stand up and be counted. Therefore look no further; I am guilty of allowing Columbia to crash.

Most people, Tavris and Aronson write, want to believe that they’re right, so they bend over backwards to make facts conform to their chosen version of reality. “The mind wants to protect itself from the pain of dissonance with the balm of self-justification,” they write, “but the soul wants to confess. To reduce dissonance, most of us put an enormous amount of mental and physical energy into protecting ourselves and propping up our self-esteem when it sags under the realization that we have been foolish, gullible, mistaken, corrupted, or otherwise human.” Hale didn’t do that. He owned the crisis.

Years later, he apologized again. When researching what exactly had gone wrong with Columbia, NASA decided that workers had improperly installed the foam insulation on the shuttle’s fuel tanks. But in December 2005, scientists discovered that the normal thermal cycles the fuel went through as the tank was filled could cause the foam to crack…but only when the tank was full. They’d never tested the foam with full tanks, only partially filled ones.  The foam hadn’t been wrongly installed at all.

Hale writes on his fascinating blog:

I flew to New Orleans [the foam had been installed by workers at the Michoud Assembly Facility in Louisiana] within a few days, and called an all hands meeting where I publicly apologized to the foam technicians.  They had not caused the loss of Columbia through poor workmanship.  Those guys were reeling from the hurricane’s devastation to their homes and community, and has lived with nearly 3 years of blame.  Thin comfort for me to apologize: so late, so little.

We worked feverishly to remove foam on foam wherever we could, minimize it where it could not be eliminated, and the following July we were ready to try again.

Discovery flew on July 4, 2006; no significant foam loss occurred.

I consider that to be the real return to flight for the space shuttle.

So were we stupid?  Yes.

Can you learn from our mistake?  I hope so.

So when you go to the Smithsonian and see Discovery there, think how lucky you are to see her whole, intact, and with her crews safely on the ground.

You see, this is how I found out that we were never really as smart as we thought we were.

Maybe that is a lesson that applies to you, too.

Indeed. Making mistakes is human, as Tavris and Aronson point out. Not wanting to admit our mistakes is also human. That’s precisely why so many of the crap apologies we analyze on this blog are crap: the apologizer evades the essential act of OWNING THE SIN. But Hale was brave, and more than willing. He was honest with himself and others. And just as doctors’ sincere apologies can keep patients from suing and companies’ good and non-legalistically dickweedish apologies can keep everyone out of the courtroom, individuals’ well-crafted, honest apologies don’t necessarily lead to punishment or shaming. Indeed, Hale was promoted to manager of the shuttle program at NASA. (He retired in 2010, after serving as flight director for 40 shuttle flights. He’s now an aerospace consultant in Colorado. Seriously, go read the guy’s whole blog.)

To recap: A good apology names what, precisely, you’re apologizing for. (Not “what happened” or “revelations in the media.” The thing itself.) It shows you understand why others — not you — are hurting. (This is not about you.) It doesn’t hide behind justifications or passive-voice weaselly sentence construction. (“Mistakes were made” — uh-huh.) It promises effort to change so that the sin isn’t repeated. (Change the procedures. Talk to the staff. Take a consciousness-raising class. Pay a self-imposed penalty. Help others.) Hale’s apologies — the well-publicized one and the lesser-known one — do everything an apology is supposed to do.