You Said Sorry to the Chair You Walked Into
Load · The Reading Room, Vol. 53 · 9 min read · why the threshold sits lower for you, and the one-week swap that changes it
Based on the published research of
Karina Schumann, PhD · Associate Professor of Social Psychology, University of Pittsburgh · faculty page · her research · Google Scholar · ResearchGate · LinkedIn
You turned around too fast in the kitchen, caught your hip on the corner of a chair, and said sorry. Out loud. To the chair.
Nobody was in the room. If you have ever caught yourself and thought, why do I apologize for everything, up to and including furniture, you already know the list this belongs to. Sorry for the delay, sent forty minutes after an email arrived. Sorry, quick question. Sorry to be a pain. Psychologist Karina Schumann ran a twelve-night diary study on exactly this question, and the answer she found is not the one most articles reach for.
The short answer: a 2010 diary study by Karina Schumann, now Associate Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, found that women apologize more often than men, but apologize for the same share of the offenses they perceive, roughly 81% in both groups.¹ The difference sits earlier than the apology. Women register more moments as needing one in the first place.
The skim version
- Karina Schumann and Michael Ross had 66 people keep a nightly diary for 12 days, logging every apology and every offense, given or received.¹
- Women reported 217 apologies to men’s 158. They also reported 267 offenses to men’s 196.¹
- Once offenses were counted, both groups apologized for about 81% of the ones they noticed. No gap in willingness.¹
- Asked to rate identical written scenarios, women judged them more severe than men did, 5.10 versus 4.75 on a seven-point scale.¹
- What the diary study could not settle: where the threshold gets set, and whether it moves. That part came later, from other labs.
What the diary study actually found · Why the threshold sits where it does · What it costs at work · The replacement word · Questions
Why do I apologize for everything when other people do not?
Because you are running a wider filter, and the study behind this is unusually clean.
Schumann and Ross, then at the University of Waterloo, asked 33 women and 33 men to complete a diary every evening for twelve nights, recording every apology they gave, and every moment, theirs or someone else’s, that might have called for one. Across the study, 869 offenses were logged in total.¹
Women reported offering more apologies: 217 against 158. That confirms the stereotype, and it is where most coverage of this study stops.
The next number is the one that changes the story. Women also reported committing more offenses: 267 against 196. Divide one by the other and the gap closes. Men apologized for 81% of the offenses they noticed. Women apologized for 81% of the offenses they noticed. The same rate.¹
The researchers checked one more possibility before settling on this reading: that men were simply reluctant to admit fault. If that were true, men would report fewer offenses as the person at fault but a normal number as the person wronged. That is not the pattern. Men reported fewer offenses from both sides, including the ones done to them.¹
So the mechanism sits in perception. A second study by the same team confirmed it directly: given identical written scenarios, women rated them as more severe. That severity rating predicted whether an apology felt owed, and it did the predicting on its own. “There seems to be more offenses that are kind of crossing the threshold for women of deserving an apology,” Schumann told WISN in a 2026 interview about the work.²
We are not clinicians and not psychologists. We read the published research and translate it into plain English; the findings above belong to Dr. Schumann and her co-authors, and any error in the translation is ours.
So is having a lower threshold a fault?
Not inherently, and this is the part worth sitting with rather than rushing past.
Noticing more offenses means noticing more of other people. Registering that your tone was short at five o’clock, that someone in the meeting got talked over, that your late reply landed on somebody else’s deadline, is social attentiveness doing exactly what it evolved to do. It is the same faculty that makes you the person who notices when a colleague has gone quiet in a room.
Schumann and Ross flagged the same tension in their own paper, suggesting the gap traces partly to women reporting more empathy for the person on the other side of an offense, and more guilt once one has happened.¹ Linguist Deborah Tannen, Professor at Georgetown University and author of the research behind You Just Don’t Understand, has spent decades documenting a related pattern in how men and women use language at work: for many women, an apology functions less as an admission of fault and more as a way of maintaining rapport, a kind of conversational oil rather than a confession.³
You would not want to switch the noticing off. It is a real asset, and pretending otherwise would not be honest.
The cost is not in the noticing. It is in the automatic verbal reflex wired to it, which fires whether the noticing was accurate or not, and which has become the same sound whether you missed a deadline or were walked into by a stranger.
| The moment | What sorry is doing | What would be more accurate |
|---|---|---|
| Replying 40 minutes late | Pre-empting a complaint nobody made | “Thanks for waiting.” |
| Asking a colleague a question | Apologizing for doing your job | Ask the question. |
| Someone bumps into you | Absorbing a shared moment alone | Nothing. A nod. |
| Disagreeing in a meeting | Softening the disagreement away | “I see it differently.” |
| You genuinely got it wrong | Repair. This is the one that works. | “I’m sorry. Here’s the fix.” |
Only the bottom row is an apology doing its actual job. The more the word gets spent on the four rows above it, the less weight it carries when you reach the one that matters.
What the research found
The study. Schumann, K., & Ross, M. “Why Women Apologize More Than Men.” Psychological Science, 2010, 21(11):1649–1655. A 12-day diary study of 66 people, plus a follow-up experiment rating identical scenarios for severity.¹
The finding. Men and women apologize at the same rate once you control for how many offenses each group perceives. In the paper’s own words, apology behavior “stem[s] from a discrepancy between the sexes in what they consider offensive, rather than from a difference in their inherent willingness to apologize for a given offense.”¹
The limitation. The 66 participants were university students and staff at a single Canadian institution. A diary study can show a pattern and its size in one population. It cannot tell you where the threshold was set for you specifically, and it cannot rule out that the diary itself, being an act of noticing, nudged the count.
If you already suspect the answer is yes, and have been paying it quietly for years, the Quiet Audit is ten short questions about the rest of the bill. Start here.
Does over-apologizing actually cost anything at work?
Yes, though not in the way the standard advice frames it. “Stop apologizing, it undermines your authority” is a slightly insulting fix, since it asks a woman to manage other people’s perception of her rather than asking what the habit is doing.
The real cost is currency. A genuine apology reduces anger and repairs a relationship, and that is well established.¹ That effectiveness gets spent on doorways and forty-minute email delays, until there is less of it left for the moment that actually needs it.
The second cost is quieter. Each reflexive sorry is a small accepted claim of fault, and accepted claims accumulate into a background sense that you are generally, mildly, in the wrong. Say it eleven times before lunch and by mid-afternoon you feel behind on something you cannot name.
The group chat where you type the honest answer, delete it, and send something softer is the same reflex operating with family. The 6:58 p.m. reply that opens by apologizing for the previous reply belongs to the quick question that is never quick.
The version that costs the most in meetings
The email openers are the visible half. The expensive one happens out loud, in about four words.
You have read the deck. You think the timeline is wrong, you have the reason, and you have been right about this exact kind of thing before. What comes out is: “Sorry, I might be missing something here, but should we maybe look at the Q3 dependency?”
Count what that sentence gave away before it reached its point: an apology, a suggestion that you are the one confused, a hedge, and a softener. Four discounts applied to a position you actually hold with confidence. The room hears a question. You meant to raise a flag.
Six weeks later the timeline slips on exactly the dependency you named, and nobody remembers you named it, including you, because you filed it as a tentative question rather than a call.
The fix is smaller than it sounds. Say the same thing without the runway: “The Q3 dependency worries me. Here’s why.” Same content, no discounts. It reads as blunt for about two meetings, then it is simply how you talk.
The swap: gratitude in place of apology
Do not try to stop apologizing outright. That instruction fails within a day, because it turns every sentence into something you have to monitor before you say it, which is more self-surveillance, not less.
Change one specific instance instead.
Pick the reflexive email opener. For one week, wherever you would type “sorry for the delay,” type “thank you for waiting” instead.
That is the entire practice. One phrase, one context, one week.
It works because both sentences do the same social job. Each acknowledges the gap. The apology asks the reader to absolve you, a small favor requested at the top of an email. The thank-you credits them for something they already did. The recipient gets the acknowledgment either way, and you stop filing a claim of fault to get there.
Start with the email opener for a practical reason: it is written, so you see it before it sends, unlike speech, where the word is already out before you have decided anything.
Two things tend to happen. Within about three days you notice how often you were reaching for it. Somewhere in the second week you catch the same reflex forming out loud, in a meeting, and for the first time you have a second option ready.
If saying no outright is where this really bites, that runs on a related but separate mechanism, and it responds to one short, unpadded script rather than a softer apology.
Who else has measured this
Janet Holmes, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, Victoria University of Wellington. Her earlier field study, recording apologies as they actually happened in conversation rather than in a diary, found women gave 75% of the 183 apologies observed. That is the visible ratio that built the original stereotype, decades before Schumann’s data explained what was underneath it. Google Scholar profile · Wikipedia · ResearchGate · Her book (Amazon)
Alicia A. Grandey, PhD, Liberal Arts Professor of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University. Her research on emotional labor shows that managing how you come across, including softening your own speech, is real, measurable work, and that doing it constantly is what drains people at their jobs, not the job itself. faculty page · Google Scholar · ResearchGate
Deborah Tannen, PhD, University Professor, Georgetown University. Her decades of research on conversational style describes apology-as-ritual, ordinary social lubrication rather than a genuine confession of fault, and notes that this style routinely gets misread by people using a different one. faculty page · Wikipedia · Her site · Amazon author page · Press coverage · American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Frequently asked questions
Is over-apologizing a sign of low self-esteem?
The 2010 research does not support that. It found no difference in willingness to apologize once perceived offenses were accounted for, and no sign that women’s apologies were more elaborate or self-abasing than men’s.¹ The difference sits in perception, not self-worth.
Where did the stereotype come from, then?
From visible frequency. Janet Holmes’s earlier study, recording apologies as observers heard them, found women offered 75% of the ones logged. People notice that ratio in daily life without seeing the base rate of perceived offenses underneath it.
Should I stop apologizing to my partner?
No. Genuine repair in a close relationship is one of the highest-value uses an apology has. The target here is the reflex, not the practice.
What about “sorry” as a politeness marker, the way it gets used in British English?
Fair, worth separating out. Sorry as a stand-in for excuse me, said while passing someone in a doorway, is a courtesy formula with no real claim of fault attached. The one worth changing is the sorry that opens a request, or precedes what you actually think.
Will people think I’ve become difficult?
Replacing one email opener with a thank-you is not a personality change. Nobody has ever read “thank you for waiting” and concluded a colleague had gone cold.
The one move
Tonight, open your sent email and find the last “sorry for the delay.” Do not send another one this week. Wherever it would go, put “thank you for waiting” in its place, then leave it alone for seven days and see what you notice.
That is the whole assignment. Not the meetings yet, not your partner, not the chair. One phrase, one week.
If you want the longer inventory, where the threshold first got set and what it is still protecting, there is a short private audit that names it in about ten minutes. Nobody sees your answers. Start here.
A lower threshold for offense is not something anyone chooses. It tends to form early, in a house where noticing what other people needed before they said it was the thing that kept the room calm.
That same early watchfulness runs the rest of the household too. Sociologists have measured the other half of the job a chore chart never touches, and the anticipating never really clocks off.
About the researcher
Karina Schumann is Associate Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, where she directs the Conflict Resolution (CORE) Laboratory. Her research covers apology, forgiveness and how people respond to having wronged someone else. “Why Women Apologize More Than Men” (2010) and her later review, “The Psychology of Offering an Apology” (2018), are the foundation of this article. University of Pittsburgh faculty page
On the researcher: Karina Schumann’s PhD is in social psychology, not clinical psychology; her work is peer-reviewed research, not therapy guidance.
Disclosure
This article is informational and is not medical advice.
We are not clinicians and not psychologists. We read the published work and translate it into plain English.
Blue Leaf Journal has no affiliation with, and no endorsement from, Karina Schumann, the University of Pittsburgh, Janet Holmes, Victoria University of Wellington, Alicia Grandey, Pennsylvania State University, Deborah Tannen, or Georgetown University.
No commercial relationship exists with any person, institution, book or method mentioned here.
Every quotation and figure above was checked against the primary source on 3 September 2026. Corrections: the comment field below this article reaches the editor. We amend errors in place and note the change and its date here.
References
1. Schumann, K., & Ross, M. “Why Women Apologize More Than Men: Gender Differences in Thresholds for Perceiving Offensive Behavior.” Psychological Science, 2010, 21(11):1649–1655. journals.sagepub.com
2. Schumann, K., quoted in “Women are over-apologizing — it’s more complex than you think.” WISN, 2026. wisn.com
3. Tannen, D. You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. William Morrow, 1990; faculty research overview. georgetown.edu
4. Holmes, J. Sex differences and apologies: One aspect of communicative competence. Applied Linguistics, 1989, 10:194–213.
5. Grandey, A. A. Emotional regulation in the workplace: A new way to conceptualize emotional labor. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 2000, 5(1):95–110. psych.la.psu.edu
Written by Nora Whitfield for Blue Leaf Journal. Updated: September 3, 2026.
