The role of apology beliefs for apology tendencies across cultures with varying honor norms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Apologies serve as crucial tools for relationship repair, promoting reconciliation, and demonstrating accountability. However, beliefs about the morality, effectiveness, and responsibility-signaling nature of apologies may vary across cultures, particularly in contexts shaped by honor norms where apologies fit central cultural concerns for morality and strength in ambiguous ways. This study investigates the relation between apology beliefs and cultural honor norms across 14 Mediterranean, East Asian, and Anglo-Western samples ( N = 5,296). We assessed personal and normative beliefs about apologies and their alignment with apology tendencies (willingness to apologize and past offered apologies) as well as intersubjectively rated honor norms. Results revealed that stronger beliefs in the morality and effectiveness of apologies, as well as perceptions of apologies as admissions of responsibility, consistently predicted greater willingness to apologize across regions and past apologies offered. Against our expectations, honor norms moderated only a few of these relations, with significant interactions suggesting weaker links between apology beliefs and apology tendencies at stronger honor norms. Complementary analyses comparing regional categorizations (Anglo-West, East Asia, and MENA) further supported a picture of relative cultural similarities but also highlighted a wider array of relevant apology beliefs in the MENA region as well as a greater focus on personal morality beliefs in Anglo Western societies and personal effectiveness beliefs in East Asian societies. Our findings underscore the universal significance of apology beliefs in fostering reconciliation while also revealing some cultural variability in how personal beliefs and cultural norms may interact in shaping apology-related behaviors across diverse societies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".