Do Women Apologise?

There was a video that came up in my feed claiming that women don't apologise.  The person made some good points, including some insights I had not thought of, but I was uncomfortable with him from minute one, and quite uncomfortable with his commenters, though I suppose he has little control over that.  It all seemed very red pill, and his other videos suggest the same.  I was going to learn how to put up a video below the fold on blogspot in order to post the video less prominently, but decided not to do it at all. 

Let me tell you the speculations it aroused, though. I think there is a lot to think about here. I reluctantly nodded in agreement that I had very seldom had a woman ever apologise to me (other than my wife), even though I mostly worked among women.  I initially scoffed, because I thought of the best women I worked with who were lion(esse)s about taking responsibility and compared his statement to them. And yet, I thought, not many apologies came out of them other than the pro forma ones like "Sorry I'm late, I got caught in the hall by the medical director and couldn't get away easily." (and that reminded me that several were deferential to authority and perhaps would apologise to their department heads, though not to me.*) But personal apologies "I said that thoughtlessly and it wasn't fair and I am sorry I insulted you"...rare.

But it was not many minutes before I thought "Wait a minute. I can't think of that many men who have apologised to me either." It seems rather easy to be selective about the data here.  People in general don't tend to apologise. We can tell stories, such as the sports culture of boys that makes saying "My bad" an automatic and that somehow carrying over, and we can overvalue a few extreme examples, male or female, in out lives that would point us in the wrong direction.  But I'm not sure what we would measure here to get a firm handle on the real data. I would have to believe someone had spent a lot of time on the issue and been very suspicious of even their own motives before I would start taking their word for it.

Yet he still might be right. Looking at the men I know, and the women I know, and the examples that come to mind, he is right. Well, so what?  Small sample size, and Lord only knows what I selected for. As a practical matter, it is no longer going to be an issue in life whether men or women do this more, and I think red pill discussions breed resentments even when they are true. (As do the blue pill podcasts that excoriate men and complain about how terrible they are.) I was more interested in where this might come from, because then I might get to contemplate some evolutionary psychology, one of my favorite topics! 

Tangent. I wrote about Apology and Forgiveness, and the need for reconciliation here. And here. But maybe, just maybe, that's all rationalisation, and people giving you a kind word and a smile is more effective.

And true to form, I did think of a possibility where if it is true that men define the problem as the problem, and women define "the other person is angry" as the problem how that would come to be and how it would not be crazy.  Women in the deeper past were often in positions of very little power, in situations where they had little contact with men, sometimes even not their husbands all that much. In the presence of networks of women they had not grown up with, and of men who might be not very concerned with them and possibly abusive, what their behaviors were had less meaning than what other people felt about them.  How other people feel really is the problem in that situation, and it's still true in abusive situations now. Not even that.  It may be true in far more situations, for both men and women, that how we feel really is more of a key than an objective analysis of what we have done. We are much less rational than we pretend.  We revert to more primitive programs often and elaborately justify them with faux reasoning.

Also, I assume it's different primitive programs when we expect an apology versus when we owe one.

So how does this fit with Aspies, or those with other social impairments?  Do they/we revert to primitive programs more easily, or less? Is that different for Aspie men and Aspie women?  Have fun with this one.  I doubt there is much hard evidence, so the experience of people with high spectrum awareness such as this group may be the closest thing we have to hard evidence at the moment.  Even wrong answers may lead to good ones in the early stages of analysis.

*I do suspect, because of a few very strong examples, that people who are noticeably deferential to authority tend to have high expectations of obedience from those they have authority over, and can even be harsh and exacting about it.