Apologies

Further to Professor Festinger’s unwillingness to accept facebooks repeated privacy violations and hackneyed apologies, I wanted to look at organizational responses to public outcry. The article I found is out of the Harvard Business Review is a step-by-step guide: https://hbr.org/2015/09/the-organizational-apology. A quote I found especially interesting:
“For many years, medical professionals were advised not to apologize when they made mistakes that hurt or even killed patients, because doing so might make the hospital vulnerable to a malpractice lawsuit. But research has revealed that when some hospitals began allowing doctors to offer apologies to patients and families, or even made apologizing mandatory, the likelihood of litigation was reduced.”

In most recent memory, a month ago Chewies Oyster Bar & Grill was burned at the stake for captioning an instagram “Can we get a couple skinny bitches at the bar please…”. After a long and heated debate, they released two apologies (because the first was deemed insufficient by the mob) and a lengthy post detailing the situation and their response to it (which can be seen on reddit here): https://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/comments/l0ofl7/vancouver_drama_chronicles_chewies_restaurant_and/

I would be very interested to see some real statistics on apologies and the public’s willingness to accept these offerings.

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