When do men apologize

Losing face for a man? No way! Also read: The Magic of Saying Sorry. People can also perceive the act of apologizing as a sign of weakness, making them feel as if they have lost their power, status, or are inadequate, incompetent, foolish, even outright stupid. Some find saying sorry humiliating, embarrassing or shameful.

Perhaps it has to do with their being criticized harshly by parents or other authority figures when they were growing up and therefore are afraid to own up to a mistake because it brings up uncomfortable and maybe even very unpleasant feelings they had then. Childhood traumas can last well into adulthood, as we know. This sometimes happens to the children of public figures, celebrities or simply high performing professionals.

Even though they may themselves also have the same talents as their parents, fear of being compared to their progenitor makes them quash their talents and work in a totally different professional field.

When you find something hard to do or accept, you can go into denial. Play ostrich anyone? The one who has wronged has to apologize to the wronged one, but often men stumble over the fragile ego and false pride that they are famous for. In a patriarchal world, men feel more entitled, and feel they can get away with more. Obviously, if someone feels entitled, they are not going to have a lot of empathy, are they? There are endless articles on how women can curb their instinct towards apologizing.

Barbie is, right at the moment, doing a vlog on how girls can stop apologizing. The trail of tears, for instance, was not one of our better moments. In other words, you either have to be perfect or develop the ability to ignore all evidence to contrary. To play on an old maxim, people who are unwilling to apologize are either Gods or monsters. To do so is simply to acknowledge that other people have an internal life. We might be wrong in the assumptions we make about it—the person you apologized to for sitting down in front of them actually had no desire to take that chair—and that might be irritating.

But the instinct to attempt to put yourself in others shoes is a fundamentally good one. Statements like the one in Forbes , about how people will take you less seriously if you apologize too often—well, why? Caring about others so much that you attempt to empathize with them is a good quality, not a bad one. Sorry to disrupt that lovely feeling of superiority, ladies, but newly published research suggests such smug explanations miss the mark.

This thesis was confirmed by two studies. In the first, 33 male and 33 female college students filled out an online questionnaire each evening for 12 nights. As expected, the women reported offering more apologies than the men. However, they also reported committing more offenses. So men are less likely to perceive a situation as reaching the level of significance necessary to warrant an apology, whether they are the offending or offended party.