Previous studies on speech acts, including apologies, suggest that there are multiple social
factors that influence the speaker’s choice of speech act strategies. Some of these factors include
“social power (status), social distance, sex, and age” (Olshtain 1989: 158, referring to Olshtain and Weinbach 1987). Following this finding, the second research question of this study focuses on the comparison between men and women in the use of apology strategies. Gender has been a commonly studied social factor in apology research, which is why this section will describe previous research and findings on the topic. As a whole, studies tend to indicate that there is a difference in the way men and women apologize and specifically that women are more
apologetic than men. Schumann and Ross (2010) present a counterargument to this popular view which will also be discussed toward the end of this section.
4.1 Previous research on apologies and gender
At the end of the 80’s, Holmes (1989) examined gender differences in apologies in New Zealand English. She employed an ethnographic approach and collected 183 apology interchanges (apologies and responses) and found that the distribution of apologies across genders has differences. Women gave 74.5% of the apologies while men gave only 25.5%; women also received 73.3% of the apologies whereas men received 26.7% of them (1989: 197). Most of the apologies (56.3%) occurred between women whereas only 8.5% of the apologies occurred between men. The apologies between male-female and female-male pairs were quite evenly distributed. The results thus show that New Zealand women apologize more than their male counterparts, but women are also apologized to much more often. Holmes finds the result interesting because in western culture men are most often considered to be the gender that holds more power, which is why Holmes expected that women would apologize more to men.
She offers the explanation that women and men have different perceptions of apologies and of how they function. (ibid.: 198–199)
Holmes found 295 instances of apology strategy use and divided these into four basic categories of apology strategies along with a number of sub-categories. The four basic categories are A.
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explicit expression of apology, B. explanation or account, C. acknowledgement of responsibility and D.
a promise of forbearance (ibid.: 200). She concludes that there is overall not much difference between men and women in terms of strategy usage. One difference is that “men appear to use more formal sub-strategies more often than women” (ibid.: 199) and although the numbers are too small to be able to generalize this idea, it suggests that “perhaps women and men regard apologies as doing different jobs” (ibid.: 200). Holmes then analyses the types of offenses that were apologized for and finds that “this data suggests that … women are particularly concerned about intrusions relating to a person’s space and talking rights, while men are more concerned by inconvenience which costs another time, and damage to another’s possessions” (ibid.: 202).
Holmes also looks at the seriousness of the offense, power relations between participants, social distance, and response strategies. Based on everything, Holmes concludes that women and men apologize in somewhat different ways and in different contexts which may be because women and men do not perceive apologies in the same way. She also brings up the possibility that women consider face needs more important than men, which is why they apologize more and they are apologized to more than men (ibid.: 206).
The previously mentioned Bataineh and Bataineh (2008) conducted a cross-cultural study on 100 American and 100 Jordanian students (each group had 50 male and 50 female respondents) and their use of apology strategies. They utilized a questionnaire that presented different kinds of situations warranting apologies to which the respondents had to answer. The American group answered the questionnaire in English and the Jordanian group answered in Arabic. They found that both American and Jordanian female respondents gave explicit apologies (e.g. I am very sorry) more than their male counterparts, and also used more primary strategies (such as accounts and reparation) (2008: 807–808, 815). Both American and Jordanian male respondents were found to use more non-apology strategies (such as laughing it off or blaming the victim) than their female counterparts (ibid.: 808, 815). American and Jordanian students were compared next, and Bataineh and Bataineh found that Jordanian students used more manifestations of an explicit apology than Americans. Both groups used the same primary strategies (explicit apology, accounts and reparation) but the frequencies varied. (ibid.: 815–816) The study thus implies that there are differences in the use of apology strategies based on both gender and culture.
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Ogiermann (2008) studies the apologies of British and Russian university students. She used a discourse completion test (DCT) for data collection which includes scenarios to which the subjects had to respond. The British students responded in English and the Russian ones in Russian. She found that both British and Russian women express more explicit apologies than their male counterparts and often prefer the form of the apology which has a stronger
illocutionary force (ibid.: 278). Both British and Russian women employed a bit more adverbial intensifiers (e.g. really, very) than men (ibid.). Both British and Russian women also used
exclamations more frequently than men did (ibid.: 274, 276). British and Russian women tended to use more positive politeness apology strategies than men, which “seems to confirm the thesis that women put more effort into maintaining relationships than men” (ibid.: 278). British and Russian women use more upgrading (e.g. justify, lack of intent, embarrassment) and fewer
downgrading accounts (e.g. deny, minimize, act innocently) than their male counterparts, although the choices of account types are “partly contradictory” (ibid.: 279). Ogiermann also finds that “the classification of the responses according to whether they entail responsibility acceptance
considerably reduces the differences between genders. In both languages, the number of apologetic responses are nearly equal for both genders” (ibid.: 279–280). Ogiermann concludes that while there are gender-specific differences in the data, the most statistically significant differences appear between languages (ibid.: 278). This study shows support for the notion that women and men apologize in slightly different ways, but it also emphasizes the importance of culture.
In more recent years, Jones and Adrefiza (2017) conducted a cross-cultural study on Australian English (AE) and Bahasa Indonesian (BI) native speakers’ apologies. The study includes 12 Australian English speakers (6 men and 6 women) and 12 Bahasa Indonesian speakers (6 men and 6 women) who were asked to express apologies in different situations. They had time to prepare and then their apologies were audio-recorded. Jones and Adrefiza found that in both languages women use apology terms (AE sorry, BI maaf) more than their male counterparts (2017: 98). They also noticed that while intensifiers (such as really, so) are not used much in BI, they are used slightly more in AE. Furthermore, female AE speakers used them more than their male counterparts (ibid.: 106). Jones and Adrefiza thus find that male AE speakers “appear less insistent on the apology” and are “altogether quite ‘cool’, casual and brief”, whereas female AE
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speakers “quite heavily emphasize sorry” and “tend to be more ‘committed’ to the apology than the males” (ibid.: 107). As for the Indonesian apologies, they find that “[t]he females are not necessarily any more elaborate than their male counterparts” and that women use hearer-oriented forms and, consequently, negative politeness, more than men (ibid.: 107–108). Jones and Adrefiza also conclude that AE apologies tend to be speaker-oriented whereas BI apologies tend to be hearer-oriented (ibid.: 104).
As demonstrated by the studies introduced just now, previous research indicates that there are differences in the way women and men apologize, even across languages and cultures. There are differences in apology strategy use and there is a strong tendency for women to be more apologetic than men. I was interested to know whether an opposing view on this had been presented, but nearly all the studies I was able to find seemed to support this notion, although Holmes (1989) did find in her study that there were no large differences in men and women’s usage of apology strategies. However, Schumann and Ross (2010: 1649) claim that “[d]espite widespread acceptance of the idea that there exists a gender difference in apology behaviour, there is no compelling evidence of such a difference.” They also criticize Holmes’ (1989) study’s finding about women apologizing more than men and give two alternative explanations for it:
“First, perhaps women offered more apologies because they committed more offenses. Second, men might have a higher threshold for what constitutes an offense” (2010: 1650). Schumann and Ross conducted two studies to investigate the matter.
Schumann and Ross’ (2010) first study includes 33 female and 33 male university students who were asked to answer a diary-type questionnaire for 12 nights. These entries were to describe situations during this period where the participant was an offender (i.e. participant apologized to someone or did something that might require an apology), and situations where the participant was a victim (i.e. participant was apologized to or someone did something to the participant that might have required an apology) (2010: 1650). The material was then analyzed and the offenses were categorized. The results show that women did report apologizing more, but this was
influenced by the fact that they also committed more offenses in general (ibid.: 1651). Schumann and Ross thus found that there was no difference between men and women in the frequency of apologies or in how the groups apologized: “It appears that once men and women categorized a
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behavior as offensive, they were equally likely to apologize for it, and their apologies were similarly effusive.” (ibid.: 1651) Based on the data, Schumann and Ross suggest that men and women may have different ideas of what is considered offensive behavior and that “women have a lower threshold for what constitutes offensive behavior” (ibid.: 1651).
The second study they did was based on the results of the first one and this time their aim was
“to determine whether gender differences in perceptions of apology deservedness were mediated by judgments of offense severity” (Schumann and Ross 2010: 1652). This time the study included 63 female and 57 male students, who were asked to imagine certain conflict scenarios with a friend and to evaluate the scenarios as instructed. The students were also asked to recall a recent case from their own life where they offended a friend and to evaluate that situation similarly. Schumann and Ross found that women considered their offenses in both scenarios to be more severe compared to men and that the severity affected their view on how deserving the victim was of an apology (ibid.: 1653).
Based on these two studies, Schumann and Ross thus present the possibility that women are not more apologetic than men, but rather women and men have different ideas for which actions are considered offensive and require an apology. If women consider more actions offensive, they will apologize and expect apologies more as well. This is an interesting counterargument to the popular notion presented by multiple previous studies and something that is good to keep in mind in regard to the current study. Whereas many previous studies have aimed to find out who apologizes more frequently, this study’s aim is not to examine how many apology videos men and women produce nor compare that to how many offenses they commit. That might be a topic for another study, but as of now that cannot be investigated. What the current study can do and aims to do, however, is evaluate whether there are differences in the way apologies are presented by men and women.
This ends the theoretical part of this thesis. Next, we will move on to discussing the empirical study.
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