No Excuses
Snyder, Ontario
A funny game imitating a negative feedback system.Excuse-making is a common strategy people invoke to feel better following a negative event. When excuses are advanced in public, their effectiveness may depend on whether they are validated by others. The present study was conducted to assess the emotional impact on participants of having their excuses validated by a supportive stranger in a conversation about a real life negative event, as compared to receiving no support from an attentive audience. Participants were thirty one male and thirtynine female undergraduate students, who participated for course credit. participants' affective state was assessed prior to and after talking to a supportive stranger who either validated or did not validate their excuses. It was hypothesized that participants in the excuse-validation condition would report lower levels of negative affect at the post-conversation assessment than participants whose excuses were not validated. The results indicated that excuse-validation is an effective form of social support and is necessary for publicly made excuses to alleviate negative affect.
Social psychology is replete with evidence that people who receive information that threatens their sense of self, such as a negative evaluation, will distort the information in self-serving ways (see Miller & Porter, 1988; Snyder & Higgins, 1988; Taylor & Brown, 1988, for reviews). Snyder, Higgins, and Stucky (1983) have demonstrated that making excuses (e.g., trivializing negative feedback, making an external attribution for the cause of an unfavorable outcome) is a common way in which people attempt to construct a less threatening reality following upsetting experiences.
In vestigations of excuses and related processes tend to focus on excuses people make in private, laboratory contexts after receiving some form of negative feedback (see Snyder & Higgins, 1988, for a review). The results of this research suggest that processes that help people evade responsibility for their negative outcomes, such as excuses, are...