BizWizard Web page
178 LU SE stand 100
Sorry seems to be the hardest word
2055 cathrine felix 600
We all make mistakes. But why do we find it so difficult to eat humble pie and apologise when we have made a mistake? What is a mistake and what is an acceptable apology, or when do we refrain from apologising?

This is what philosopher Cathrine Felix we be talking about when she gives her lecture at this year’s Humanities and Theology Days on the theme of Mistakes.

“One interesting thing about mistakes is that they are so evenly distributed. Even the most intelligent people make mistakes. You only need to consider the world-famous explorer Christopher Columbus who found the wrong continent, and politician Barack Obama, who claimed in an election speech to have visited 57 US states”, says Cathrine Felix.

“What is also fascinating is that mistakes often function as a social glue. Admitting your own clumsiness is often a good way of breaking the ice... People recognise themselves in you and drop their guard. We see this approach become an art in stand-up comedy”, she continues.
A book about mistakes
Cathrine Felix wrote her doctoral thesis about small mistakes, known as “slips”. She is now writing a book about mistakes and difficult decisions. As a mistakes researcher, she has collected for fun all the excuses that students come up with when they are late in submitting an assignment. The absolutely most common excuse is “I couldn’t send in the assignment because my computer crashed”.

“Another surprisingly common excuse is ‘I have to go to my grandmother’s funeral.’ When poor grandma has died five times in the course of the student’s degree programme, you know you are dealing with a chronic excuse-producer”, says Cathrine Felix.

Slightly more on the serious side, these are two examples of excuses that are unacceptable because they only blame something or someone else, the latter case being particularly distasteful as the person is lying about the death of a relative. A simple definition of a real apology entails the person taking responsibility for something going wrong, and meaning it sincerely.

“Another unacceptable excuse is for example ‘I am sorry you got upset’. This statement is camouflaged as an apology. It is a common bullying strategy against LGBTQIA people, or used in racist contexts. The blame is placed on the victim, i.e. ‘if you are so sensitive and take offence then I apologise’”, explains Cathrine Felix.

When mistakes are made, we try to allocate responsibility and blame; we either apologise or expect an apology.

“Inspired by Wittgenstein, this is what I call an ‘apology game’. The apology you give must be meaningful to all those involved. An apology which only means something to you is not an acceptable apology”, says Cathrine Felix.
In the shower with socks on
In brief, mistakes can be explained as something we think or do which does not correspond to facts or standard norms; they can be divided into small, “shit happens-mistakes”, such as stepping into the shower with your socks on, vital, such as marrying the wrong person, or fatal, which can have deadly outcomes such as plane crashes due to mistakes made in the cockpit.

“Because we talk so much, slips of the tongue are probably the most frequent type of mistake. These can lead to major consequences, but often there are none whatsoever”, says Cathrine Felix.

Admitting a mistake is no simple matter. This is why rationalisation is a common way of dealing with it. Leon Festinger describes it as “cognitive dissonance”, i.e. trying to get the world to correspond to what we are feeling, or what we have done. One example is the sect that believed that the world was going to end on 21 December 1954. When the doomsday prophecy did not come to pass, the sect leader had a vision that the world had survived despite everything, thanks to the strength of the sect members’ faith.

“In order to avoid rattling our self-image, we change the story and find an explanation for why it wasn’t really a mistake, in other words we don’t apologise at all”, says Cathrine Felix.


Sidney Dekker, former professor of system safety at LU, thinks that what we call human error doesn’t really exist. When accidents or errors happen, we always try to find a scapegoat. But, according to him, that person’s mistake is merely a symptom of deeper, underlying structural faults.

“A fairness aspect comes into play here too. Blame should be placed on the right party. People shouldn’t lose their jobs when a grave error in administering medication could be attributable to there being two apparently identical containers next to each other, albeit with different contents, and the nurse happened to pick the wrong one. But of course, the mistake can be attributable to the individual, if the nurse came to work under the influence of alcohol, for example”, says Cathrine Felix.

“Making many mistakes can also be seen as necessary to achieving success. You get impressed by how many things do end up going right anyway”, concludes Cathrine Felix.

By Gisela Lindberg – published on 14 February 2019
152 Lunds universitet L RGB