When the writers Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy started the blog SorryWatch a decade ago, they were told, repeatedly, that “apologies were having a moment.”
These were the days of Anthony Weiner and his sexting scandals; of Eliot Spitzer and his high-end madam; of Mark “Appalachian Trail” Sanford. Back then, the supposedly sorry had to sweat through public news conferences, often with seething wives by their side, and the public could analyse body language — hand gestures, biting one’s lip (a Bill Clinton signature) — to determine their level of sincerity. And so, Ms. Ingall and Ms. McCarthy began evaluating each ritual of repentance — exalting the good, shaming the bad, dissecting those sorries so lazy they deserved apologies of their own.
Today, that all seems almost quaint: “That feels like a relic now,” said Ms. Ingall. Now, on SorryWatch, important historical apologies — say, Australia’s leading lawmakers for sexual abuse in Parliament — are mixed in with mea culpas over microslights and Twitter gaffes. No longer can each apology be scrutinised and broken down the way Ms. Ingall and Ms. McCarthy once did; there are simply too many sorries to track.
This month alone, we’ve seen apologies from:
Whoopi Goldberg. Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan’s boss.
Hal Rogers, representative from Kentucky, who told a congressional colleague to “kiss my ass” when she asked him to put on a mask.
Glenn Youngkin, governor of Virginia, for trolling a 17-year-old on Twitter, and then again for mixing up two Black state senators.
The rapper Nelly, after he accidentally uploaded a video of a woman performing oral sex on him to Instagram.
A defensive linebacker for the Washington Commanders, for tweeting that he’d like to have dinner with Hitler.
A local Florida sheriff, who apologised to his wife for . . . well, it’s unclear, because the thing for which he was apologising was never actually public, even if the apology was.
And this guy, an otherwise private individual, who angered enough people on Twitter when he joked, “if you’re someone who brings a book to a bar . . . nobody likes you,” that he delivered a mea culpa that was 27 times the length of the original offence.
It can feel these days like we are swimming in a sea of ostensible contrition. But something strange has happened in the process. Instead of leaving us feeling healed, or as if there is a rightful place for accountability in our world, all this apologising seems to, instead, have had a flattening effect. Everyone is sorry, yet at the same time, no one’s apology feels like enough.
Call it apology atrophy.
Apologies for major offences at times hardly register; those for microharms — that books-in-bars guy delivered a lovely apology, but did he need to? — are lauded; while others (from, say, an Oklahoma congressional candidate who puked into a girl’s shoe during a visit to a tween slumber party, where she accidentally got blackout drunk) feel almost too humiliating to treat as national news.
And an apology’s sincerity, it seems, often has little to do with any subsequent punishment. Why did Ms. Goldberg — who, by all accounts, followed the textbook formula for a good apology, doing so twice, then enlisting the help of the Anti-Defamation League to make amends — receive a two-week suspension from her job, while Joe Rogan, who called his repeated use of the N-word “the most regretful and shameful thing that I’ve ever had to talk about publicly,” received no penalty?
This isn’t the first “age of apology.” Nor is it the first in which public apologies have been deemed insincere.
And yet, something about this era of contrition feels different.
It’s not just the speed at which the apologies are incoming, though that’s part of it. (With each edit of this Opinion piece, a new apology has emerged. The latest — or, at least, one of the latest — came from Rosie O’Donnell, for assuming that Priyanka Chopra and Deepak Chopra were related, which they are not. She apologised, but while doing so seemed to not remember Ms. Chopra’s first name, for which she issued a second apology, which Ms. Chopra declined to accept.)
It’s more than the disembodied way in which such apologies are delivered, though that’s a factor too. (Ms. O’Donnell’s was on TikTok; while Ms. Chopra responded in Instagram stories.)
Perhaps it’s that public apologies, no matter how insincere, once seemed to serve a social function: They established our societal red lines; they showed us that even the powerful could be held responsible for their actions; and the act of apologising itself, with all the discomfort and squirming involved, often seemed like real punishment. “It was an admission of defeat as much as an admission of guilt,” said the linguist Deborah Tannen.
Today, all manner of offences are deemed apology-worthy and it takes very little squirming to dash off a tweet. But our response to these developments hasn’t been to calibrate our reactions accordingly; we seem to be demanding apologies as quickly as we dismiss them.
It’s an interesting paradox, said Karina Schumann, a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, who runs the Conflict Resolution Lab there. On the one hand, she said, we’re living in an age of accountability — where there’s a call for transparency, conversations about what’s right and what’s wrong and power on the part of the public to demand a response.
Amid that, it has become almost expected that public figures, and even not-so-public figures, be held “accountable” for even the smallest misdeeds. And yet that very expectation, she said, has raised the bar for what is considered “sincere” — which can water down the apology’s impact.
Social scientists have deemed this concept “normative dilution” — the idea that it’s possible for a thing to become so normalised that we become cynical to it, even as we demand it. But that cynicism can make us less likely to forgive — in turn, rendering an apology, even an authentic one, useless in the first place.
Which isn’t to say that the apology serves no function. There is plenty of research to show that a sincere apology still retains great value in our culture — particularly when delivered to an actual person. In one study, of surgery patients who’d filed malpractice suits, 40 percent said that an apology from the doctor along with an explanation might have prevented them from suing in the first place.
It’s the public apologies, often delivered to an amorphous audience, that become more complex. Ms. Schumann’s own research, of #MeToo-related apologies, has found that even the highest-quality expressions of remorse — the nondefensive, the clearly contrite — left victims, and the public, dissatisfied. In a 2019 study, which applied hypothetical apologies to real-life scenarios in which a prominent figure said something controversial — in one experiment, Rand Paul’s comments about the Civil Rights Act; in another, Larry Summers’ comments about female scientists — researchers found that people were either unaffected by the apology or more likely to want to see the person punished.
And perhaps most applicable to the current wave of apologies, where there is often debate about the scale of the offence, is a 2020 analysis by the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, in which he explored not whether the right thing to do for a public figure was apologise, but whether it was the effective thing to do. He writes that when an offense is perceived as ambiguous — either it’s not clear whether a person has done something wrong, or there is debate about the severity — an apology will not help.
“In some cases, apologies are not merely futile; they are actually counterproductive, and so their effects are perverse,” he writes.
Ms. Schumann, the psychologist, said she struggled to talk about this aspect of apologies — because it pits the reputational incentive to apologise or not, against what is the morally decent thing to do, which is to apologise when you’re actually sorry (and, arguably, to not apologise when you’re not).
Which is, well, all a bit depressing.
But it has motivated the founders of SorryWatch, who are finishing a book on the subject, to shift their focus from the public to the personal — and how individuals can apologise well. It seemed, they said, a more rewarding effort.
Perhaps that’s the upside to so many terrible public apologies: The urge to better apologise in our own lives.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Jessica Bennett is a contributing editor of The New York Times’ Opinion section of The Times. She was appointed the paper’s first gender editor in 2017 as part of an initiative to expand coverage of women and gender issues. She teaches journalism at New York University and is the author of “Feminist Fight Club” and “This Is 18”.
