Page 59 - English Class 9

effusive apologies in 2010, after widespread reports of malfunctioning
Prius accelerators. Japan, for its part, bristled when a US submarine
commander didn’t immediately apologise after colliding with and sinking
a Japanese fishing boat off Hawaii in 2001.

The confusion over the meaning of and occasion for “I’m sorry” extends
beyond those countries; indeed, it seems that virtually every culture has
its own rules. In India, other researchers have noted, apologies are far less
common than in Japan. In Hong Kong, they are so prevalent and ritualised
that many people are inured to them.

Our own work found that a core issue is differing perceptions of
culpability: Americans see an apology as an admission of wrongdoing,
whereas Japanese see it as an expression of eagerness to repair a damaged
relationship, with no culpability necessarily implied. And this difference,
we discovered, affects how much traction an apology gains.

In an initial survey of US and Japanese undergraduates, the US students
were more likely to say that an apology directly implied guilt. The Japanese
students were more likely to apologise
even when they weren’t personally
responsible for what had happened.
Perhaps for this reason, they apologised a
lot more; they recalled issuing an average
of 11.05 apologies in the previous week,
whereas US students recalled just 4.51.

In a second study, we looked at the utility
of apologies for repairing trust. We asked undergraduates from both
countries to imagine that they were managers and showed them a video in
which an applicant for an accounting job apologised for having deliberately
filed an incorrect tax return for a prior client. The Japanese students were
more willing than their US counterparts to trust the candidate’s assertion
that she wouldn’t engage in such behavior again and to offer her a job. We
believe that this is owing to Americans’ inclination to associate apologies
with culpability.

The finding that Americans link apologies with blame is in keeping, we’d
argue, with a psychological tendency among Westerners to attribute events
to individuals’ actions. Thus it makes sense that in the US an apology is
taken to mean “I am the one who is responsible.” It also stands to reason

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