[The Psychology of Koreans] There is no grave without an excuse.
📆 2023-12-05 | By YunSeo, cho
The Definition of Excuses
According to the Shin Guk-eo Daesajeon (Kim Min-su, Hong Woong-seon, 1976), an excuse is defined as ① using another matter as a justification, ② presenting another matter as a shield. Based on this definition, an excuse refers to making justifications or pretexts.
Typically, justifications or pretexts occur with the intention of nullifying or diminishing the extent of responsibility when there is actual or anticipated accountability from others. Here, actual or anticipated accountability may arise when one's mistake or wrongdoing leads to negative consequences like harm to the other party.
Harm (offend) includes not only substantial harm, such as material, opportunistic, or status loss to the other party, but also psychological harm, such as hurting their feelings, making them angry, offending them, or causing discomfort.
Is Making Excuses a Characteristic Psychology of Koreans?
In Korean proverbs, there is a saying, "There is no grave without an excuse." Lee Dong-chan (1987), who has resided in Korea for a long time, cites this proverb as the opening title of his book "A Foreigner's View of Koreans" and explains the Korean propensity for making excuses from the perspective of the structural position of traditional society.
Characteristics of Koreans related to the psychology of making excuses include the tendency to avoid responsibility (Dong-A Ilbo Company, 1991), and the lack of individual responsibility due to the undifferentiated state of the individual from the community (Kim Jae-eun, 1987; Choi Jae-seok, 1989).
There are about 26 different proverbs related to excuses (Kim Do-hwan, 1978). Examples include, "Even if you die at eighty, you die with an excuse," "Hanging the door knocker upside down and blaming the carpenter," "A maiden giving birth but still having something to say."
In English, concepts corresponding to excuses include account, justification, and excuse. An excuse, in the context of making up reasons for a mistake or wrongdoing, is different from the more general concept of account. Justification implies arguing for the righteousness of an act, and excuse has a meaning of regret, slightly differing from the Korean concept of excuses.
Social constructivists like Hame (1984) and Vygorsky (1962) focused on the notion that human psychology is socially and culturally constructed, and especially on the organic relationship between language and psychology. That is, language not only reflects psychology but also influences how people organize their experiences. Hence, Hame emphasized the need to analyze the psychological concepts used in everyday language. Excuses, being an integral part of our daily conversations, suggest the existence of a psychology of making excuses among Koreans.
Now, let's examine the situations in which excuses commonly occur, and explore the motivational, psychological characteristics and factors related to making excuses.
A Meta-Analysis of Excuses
Excuses occur in various types of failure situations, such as non-fulfillment of promises, failure to take responsibility, accidental mistakes causing harm to others, or intentional harm. They are used when one is explicitly or implicitly asked to explain their behavior in response to being held accountable. The type of excuse varies depending on the related event and the contextual situation. Moreover, the severity of excuses ranges from minor excuses for trivial mistakes or minor breaches of promises to responsibility-reducing excuses in situations like workplace errors or not submitting assignments in school, and even to innocence-claiming excuses in divorce courts or criminal courts.
The stages of making excuses are as follows: ① Accountability towards others, ② Actual or anticipated accountability from others, ③ Preparing an excuse (i.e., waiting to make a justification or pretext). Here, the person making the excuse has a direct motive to avoid or reduce responsibility, and this psychological motivation can be explained from various aspects.
Firstly, in situations of being held accountable for one's faults, the absence of an appropriate excuse can lead to or anticipate personal losses in social, interpersonal, and interactional aspects. More directly, it can result in conflict initiation, blame from others, damage to self-esteem, and amplification of negative self-perception and emotions due to inappropriate self-management. Therefore, excuses can be seen as self-defensive justifying actions intended to avoid, reduce, or eliminate the negative outcomes mentioned above.
However, the effect of excuses does not always bring the positive outcome expected by the person making them. When an excuse is perceived as such by others, especially as a self-justification or an attempt to evade responsibility, it can be viewed negatively or at best be seen as a dubious benefit. Therefore, for an excuse to achieve the desired effect, it must be accepted by the listener as a legitimate reason. However, the way an excuse is received can vary depending on the situation.
Firstly, we can consider effective excuses that are perceived as legitimate reasons, ineffective excuses that are perceived as mere excuses, and misconceived excuses where legitimate reasons are seen as excuses. From this perspective, it's more important how the listener perceives and interprets the speaker's excuse or reason, rather than whether what the speaker says is an excuse or not. For this reason, just as perceived characteristics are more important than actual objective traits in social psychology research topics like interpersonal perception or impression evaluation, excuses also hold appropriateness and necessity as a subject for socio-psychological research.
The Relationship Between Attribution and Making Excuses
Responsibility Attribution
People begin to make excuses when there is a possibility that they might be held responsible or blamed. An excuse is an act of explaining away one's mistakes or failures. It involves the process of attributing responsibility for someone's actions and their outcomes. This leads to a judgment of accountability for the actions and results of the actor, known as 'responsibility attribution'. This judgment is determined not by the actor themselves but by the people around them.
An excuse is a linguistic defense mechanism used by people when they want to avoid or reduce their own responsibility. It is employed not only in actual situations of being held accountable but also in anticipated or predicted circumstances. The listener of the excuse, or the responsibility attributor, assesses whether the excuse is sincere and valid. This judgment can either meet the expectations of the person making the excuse or, conversely, be seen as false or inappropriate.
Perception and Judgment of Excuses
For an excuse to achieve its intended effect, the listener of the excuse must accept it as a legitimate reason. To explain through analogy, in a divorce court, a divorce is granted when the judge deems the reason for divorce to be valid.
Conversely, if the reason is not considered legitimate, the divorce request is denied. Similarly, an excuse can be accepted as either a legitimate or an inappropriate reason, that is, as an excuse.
In a divorce court, for a reason to be accepted as legitimate, the presented content must first be factual or truthful, and even after being accepted as fact or truth, the content of the reason must be appropriate for divorce.
For example, if the reason for a divorce claim is that the husband snores while sleeping, even if it's true that he snores, it cannot be an appropriate reason for divorce.
Similarly, for an excuse to be accepted as a legitimate reason, the content of the excuse must possess truthfulness and appropriateness. These two factors are already implied in the colloquial use of excuses. The phrase "Don't make up this excuse or that excuse" questions the truthfulness of the excuse, while "How can that be an excuse?" denies the appropriateness of the excuse.
For the sake of discussion, let's first address the issue of the appropriateness of excuses and then examine the truthfulness of excuses.
Appropriateness of Excuses
As mentioned earlier, an excuse is an act of evading responsibility, involving the alteration of components of information that constitute responsibility avoidance or the reinforcement of non-responsibility-avoiding information.
The components of information for responsibility avoidance focus more on internal factors within an individual than on external factors. Among these, intentionality, the foreseeability of actions and their outcomes are significant factors that have been highlighted.
For instance, if a student who is late to class says they were delayed due to traffic, and the professor believes that traffic in Seoul is always congested and thus the student could have anticipated this and left home earlier, the responsibility is attributed internally to the student. This is interpreted as controllable within the category of foreseeability and is not perceived as an unavoidable situation.
Therefore, in the perception of excuses, or in the resolution of responsibility attribution, the excuse attains the appropriateness of a legitimate reason only when the perceiver acknowledges the unavoidability of the external factors influencing the behavior.
It’s important to note that the concept of unavoidability is not identical to uncontrollability or instability. If uncontrollability or instability could have been predicted or were predictable before the occurrence of the event, that is, if the event falls under the category of predictability, then the excuse-making event can be interpreted as controllable or, further, as intentional.
The Truthfulness of Excuses
The issue of whether an excuse is perceived as an excuse or a truthful reason hinges on whether it sounds truthful or like a lie. In situations where there is no definitive objective evidence to guarantee truthfulness, a strategy focused on identifying falsehoods might be more appropriate. It can be inferred that the listener of the excuse is likely to rely on this strategy.
When examining the situation of making and hearing excuses, the person making the excuse knows the truthfulness of their excuse, while the listener, who judges the veracity of the excuse, often lacks objective information about the truthfulness of the excuse or has limited, indirect inferential evidence. In other words, without a prior schema about what kind of person the speaker is, for example, whether they are trustworthy or not, it is nearly impossible to judge the truthfulness based solely on the content of the excuse.
Therefore, for the listener of an excuse, the mode of judgment is more dominated by assessing the likelihood of falsehood rather than the truthfulness, leaning towards a presumption of lying.
Until now, psychological and social psychological research on lie detection has been limited, often confined to mechanical approaches like facial expressions or physiological cues. However, in everyday life, those judging excuses do not have information about physiological bases and do not rely solely on facial cues. They use a combination of methods for determining falsehood, including ① inferring the falsehood based on the content of the excuse, ② utilizing paralinguistic and nonverbal conventional cues, ③ prejudices based on past interactions with the individual, and prior schemas about the person based on their own experiences and the issues currently at hand.
In conclusion, the assessment of the truthfulness of an excuse in everyday life is a complex process that goes beyond simple physiological or facial cues, involving a comprehensive evaluation of content, nonverbal cues, and the individual's history and characteristics.
Determining the Truthfulness of Excuses
Let's consider the following propositions to assess whether an excuse is a lie or not.
Proposition 1: Connection between Excuse and Causality
The likelihood of an event occurring and its causal connection probability can be used to judge the falsity of an excuse. The lower the probability of the event's occurrence and its connection to the result, the more likely it is to be considered false, and vice versa.
For example, when a student excuses being late to class due to traffic, one way a professor might infer the truthfulness is by considering the frequency of traffic congestion during morning commute times and the likelihood that such congestion leads to being late for class. Following this, we can propose:
Proposition 2: Event-Result Connection
In terms of event-result connection, the more likely the result is linked to events other than the one cited, the higher the likelihood the excuse is perceived as false. Furthermore, the higher the possibility of the outcome being linked to a different and opposing result, the greater the perceived falsity.
Proposition 3: Falseness of the Excuse
Common excuses in society for certain behaviors are often latent within an individual's cognitive schema as social conventions. When faced with such situations, the listener of the excuse will apply these social excuse schemas to judge its falsity.
Proposition 4: Logical Consistency of the Excuse
An excuse is more likely to be accepted as true when it has a reasonable level of logical consistency and natural causality. However, if the causal logic is overly complicated, involves excessive inference, or lacks natural logical consistency, it is more likely to be perceived as false.
Paralinguistic and Nonverbal Conventional Cues
From a paralinguistic perspective, the pitch, intensity, and speed of speech contribute to the judgment of falsehood. Nonverbal cues such as facial expressions, movements of hands and feet, gestures, and body posture can also play a role in determining the falseness of an excuse.
[The Psychology of Koreans] There is no grave without an excuse.
📆 2023-12-05 | By YunSeo, cho
The Definition of Excuses
According to the Shin Guk-eo Daesajeon (Kim Min-su, Hong Woong-seon, 1976), an excuse is defined as ① using another matter as a justification, ② presenting another matter as a shield. Based on this definition, an excuse refers to making justifications or pretexts.
Typically, justifications or pretexts occur with the intention of nullifying or diminishing the extent of responsibility when there is actual or anticipated accountability from others. Here, actual or anticipated accountability may arise when one's mistake or wrongdoing leads to negative consequences like harm to the other party.
Harm (offend) includes not only substantial harm, such as material, opportunistic, or status loss to the other party, but also psychological harm, such as hurting their feelings, making them angry, offending them, or causing discomfort.
Is Making Excuses a Characteristic Psychology of Koreans?
In Korean proverbs, there is a saying, "There is no grave without an excuse." Lee Dong-chan (1987), who has resided in Korea for a long time, cites this proverb as the opening title of his book "A Foreigner's View of Koreans" and explains the Korean propensity for making excuses from the perspective of the structural position of traditional society.
Characteristics of Koreans related to the psychology of making excuses include the tendency to avoid responsibility (Dong-A Ilbo Company, 1991), and the lack of individual responsibility due to the undifferentiated state of the individual from the community (Kim Jae-eun, 1987; Choi Jae-seok, 1989).
There are about 26 different proverbs related to excuses (Kim Do-hwan, 1978). Examples include, "Even if you die at eighty, you die with an excuse," "Hanging the door knocker upside down and blaming the carpenter," "A maiden giving birth but still having something to say."
In English, concepts corresponding to excuses include account, justification, and excuse. An excuse, in the context of making up reasons for a mistake or wrongdoing, is different from the more general concept of account. Justification implies arguing for the righteousness of an act, and excuse has a meaning of regret, slightly differing from the Korean concept of excuses.
Social constructivists like Hame (1984) and Vygorsky (1962) focused on the notion that human psychology is socially and culturally constructed, and especially on the organic relationship between language and psychology. That is, language not only reflects psychology but also influences how people organize their experiences. Hence, Hame emphasized the need to analyze the psychological concepts used in everyday language. Excuses, being an integral part of our daily conversations, suggest the existence of a psychology of making excuses among Koreans.
Now, let's examine the situations in which excuses commonly occur, and explore the motivational, psychological characteristics and factors related to making excuses.
A Meta-Analysis of Excuses
Excuses occur in various types of failure situations, such as non-fulfillment of promises, failure to take responsibility, accidental mistakes causing harm to others, or intentional harm. They are used when one is explicitly or implicitly asked to explain their behavior in response to being held accountable. The type of excuse varies depending on the related event and the contextual situation. Moreover, the severity of excuses ranges from minor excuses for trivial mistakes or minor breaches of promises to responsibility-reducing excuses in situations like workplace errors or not submitting assignments in school, and even to innocence-claiming excuses in divorce courts or criminal courts.
The stages of making excuses are as follows: ① Accountability towards others, ② Actual or anticipated accountability from others, ③ Preparing an excuse (i.e., waiting to make a justification or pretext). Here, the person making the excuse has a direct motive to avoid or reduce responsibility, and this psychological motivation can be explained from various aspects.
Firstly, in situations of being held accountable for one's faults, the absence of an appropriate excuse can lead to or anticipate personal losses in social, interpersonal, and interactional aspects. More directly, it can result in conflict initiation, blame from others, damage to self-esteem, and amplification of negative self-perception and emotions due to inappropriate self-management. Therefore, excuses can be seen as self-defensive justifying actions intended to avoid, reduce, or eliminate the negative outcomes mentioned above.
However, the effect of excuses does not always bring the positive outcome expected by the person making them. When an excuse is perceived as such by others, especially as a self-justification or an attempt to evade responsibility, it can be viewed negatively or at best be seen as a dubious benefit. Therefore, for an excuse to achieve the desired effect, it must be accepted by the listener as a legitimate reason. However, the way an excuse is received can vary depending on the situation.
Firstly, we can consider effective excuses that are perceived as legitimate reasons, ineffective excuses that are perceived as mere excuses, and misconceived excuses where legitimate reasons are seen as excuses. From this perspective, it's more important how the listener perceives and interprets the speaker's excuse or reason, rather than whether what the speaker says is an excuse or not. For this reason, just as perceived characteristics are more important than actual objective traits in social psychology research topics like interpersonal perception or impression evaluation, excuses also hold appropriateness and necessity as a subject for socio-psychological research.
The Relationship Between Attribution and Making Excuses
Responsibility Attribution
People begin to make excuses when there is a possibility that they might be held responsible or blamed. An excuse is an act of explaining away one's mistakes or failures. It involves the process of attributing responsibility for someone's actions and their outcomes. This leads to a judgment of accountability for the actions and results of the actor, known as 'responsibility attribution'. This judgment is determined not by the actor themselves but by the people around them.
An excuse is a linguistic defense mechanism used by people when they want to avoid or reduce their own responsibility. It is employed not only in actual situations of being held accountable but also in anticipated or predicted circumstances. The listener of the excuse, or the responsibility attributor, assesses whether the excuse is sincere and valid. This judgment can either meet the expectations of the person making the excuse or, conversely, be seen as false or inappropriate.
Perception and Judgment of Excuses
For an excuse to achieve its intended effect, the listener of the excuse must accept it as a legitimate reason. To explain through analogy, in a divorce court, a divorce is granted when the judge deems the reason for divorce to be valid.
Conversely, if the reason is not considered legitimate, the divorce request is denied. Similarly, an excuse can be accepted as either a legitimate or an inappropriate reason, that is, as an excuse.
In a divorce court, for a reason to be accepted as legitimate, the presented content must first be factual or truthful, and even after being accepted as fact or truth, the content of the reason must be appropriate for divorce.
For example, if the reason for a divorce claim is that the husband snores while sleeping, even if it's true that he snores, it cannot be an appropriate reason for divorce.
Similarly, for an excuse to be accepted as a legitimate reason, the content of the excuse must possess truthfulness and appropriateness. These two factors are already implied in the colloquial use of excuses. The phrase "Don't make up this excuse or that excuse" questions the truthfulness of the excuse, while "How can that be an excuse?" denies the appropriateness of the excuse.
For the sake of discussion, let's first address the issue of the appropriateness of excuses and then examine the truthfulness of excuses.
Appropriateness of Excuses
As mentioned earlier, an excuse is an act of evading responsibility, involving the alteration of components of information that constitute responsibility avoidance or the reinforcement of non-responsibility-avoiding information.
The components of information for responsibility avoidance focus more on internal factors within an individual than on external factors. Among these, intentionality, the foreseeability of actions and their outcomes are significant factors that have been highlighted.
For instance, if a student who is late to class says they were delayed due to traffic, and the professor believes that traffic in Seoul is always congested and thus the student could have anticipated this and left home earlier, the responsibility is attributed internally to the student. This is interpreted as controllable within the category of foreseeability and is not perceived as an unavoidable situation.
Therefore, in the perception of excuses, or in the resolution of responsibility attribution, the excuse attains the appropriateness of a legitimate reason only when the perceiver acknowledges the unavoidability of the external factors influencing the behavior.
It’s important to note that the concept of unavoidability is not identical to uncontrollability or instability. If uncontrollability or instability could have been predicted or were predictable before the occurrence of the event, that is, if the event falls under the category of predictability, then the excuse-making event can be interpreted as controllable or, further, as intentional.
The Truthfulness of Excuses
The issue of whether an excuse is perceived as an excuse or a truthful reason hinges on whether it sounds truthful or like a lie. In situations where there is no definitive objective evidence to guarantee truthfulness, a strategy focused on identifying falsehoods might be more appropriate. It can be inferred that the listener of the excuse is likely to rely on this strategy.
When examining the situation of making and hearing excuses, the person making the excuse knows the truthfulness of their excuse, while the listener, who judges the veracity of the excuse, often lacks objective information about the truthfulness of the excuse or has limited, indirect inferential evidence. In other words, without a prior schema about what kind of person the speaker is, for example, whether they are trustworthy or not, it is nearly impossible to judge the truthfulness based solely on the content of the excuse.
Therefore, for the listener of an excuse, the mode of judgment is more dominated by assessing the likelihood of falsehood rather than the truthfulness, leaning towards a presumption of lying.
Until now, psychological and social psychological research on lie detection has been limited, often confined to mechanical approaches like facial expressions or physiological cues. However, in everyday life, those judging excuses do not have information about physiological bases and do not rely solely on facial cues. They use a combination of methods for determining falsehood, including ① inferring the falsehood based on the content of the excuse, ② utilizing paralinguistic and nonverbal conventional cues, ③ prejudices based on past interactions with the individual, and prior schemas about the person based on their own experiences and the issues currently at hand.
In conclusion, the assessment of the truthfulness of an excuse in everyday life is a complex process that goes beyond simple physiological or facial cues, involving a comprehensive evaluation of content, nonverbal cues, and the individual's history and characteristics.
Determining the Truthfulness of Excuses
Let's consider the following propositions to assess whether an excuse is a lie or not.
Proposition 1: Connection between Excuse and Causality
The likelihood of an event occurring and its causal connection probability can be used to judge the falsity of an excuse. The lower the probability of the event's occurrence and its connection to the result, the more likely it is to be considered false, and vice versa.
For example, when a student excuses being late to class due to traffic, one way a professor might infer the truthfulness is by considering the frequency of traffic congestion during morning commute times and the likelihood that such congestion leads to being late for class. Following this, we can propose:
Proposition 2: Event-Result Connection
In terms of event-result connection, the more likely the result is linked to events other than the one cited, the higher the likelihood the excuse is perceived as false. Furthermore, the higher the possibility of the outcome being linked to a different and opposing result, the greater the perceived falsity.
Proposition 3: Falseness of the Excuse
Common excuses in society for certain behaviors are often latent within an individual's cognitive schema as social conventions. When faced with such situations, the listener of the excuse will apply these social excuse schemas to judge its falsity.
Proposition 4: Logical Consistency of the Excuse
An excuse is more likely to be accepted as true when it has a reasonable level of logical consistency and natural causality. However, if the causal logic is overly complicated, involves excessive inference, or lacks natural logical consistency, it is more likely to be perceived as false.
Paralinguistic and Nonverbal Conventional Cues
From a paralinguistic perspective, the pitch, intensity, and speed of speech contribute to the judgment of falsehood. Nonverbal cues such as facial expressions, movements of hands and feet, gestures, and body posture can also play a role in determining the falseness of an excuse.