It has become a sickeningly predictable event: someone says something that upsets the unthinking unteachable mob, and then they – and pretty much anyone even tangentially associated with them – issues some sort of public apology. The apology is usually a combination of lame and embarrassing. But does it actually appease the mob?
Survey Sez: Nope.
Does apologizing work? An empirical test of the conventional wisdom
Overall, the evidence presented here suggests that the effects of an apology are close to neutral or negative depending on the context and the demographic group. If this is the case, we may wonder why public officials do in fact so often ask for forgiveness in the face of controversy. It is possible that they apologize in order to receive better coverage from the media or even to make a story go away. In one experiment, individuals judging performances in a presidential debate were influenced by the nature of commentary they watched after the fact when compared to a control group not exposed to the opinions of pundits (Fridkin et al., 2007). Likewise, if an individual apologizes for a comment that the media finds offensive, future coverage of that individual may be better than it otherwise would be. This requires the assumption that while members of the public are hostile or indifferent to those who apologize, members of the media will provide better coverage of an individual who shows repentance. There may be little reason to assume that this is the case, however, especially considering that most of the media lean to the left (Groseclose & Milyo, 2005; Groseclose, 2011) and that liberals in this study appear to be those most likely to want to punish individuals for apologizing.
Emphasis mine.
Sometimes people do or say some reprehensible things, and in those cases an apology *may* be appropriate… *if* the person in question is actually sorry for what they did. And “sorry” because they realize they did/said something bad, not because they’re being forced into an apology. But then, it certainly seems like the bulk of the calls for public struggle sessions these days are driven not because someone did something objectively bad, but because they did or said something “offensive” (example: the artist who recently groveled because racists were tearing her down for having painted herself as a comic book superhero… with a *tan*). In which case an apology is not just bad for the apologizer, it’s bad for society in that it helps to feed the beast of fascistic cancel culture. Respond some other way.
