To Apologize or Justify: Leader Responses to Task and Relational Mistakes

Abstract

Leadership roles are complex, creating an environment where leaders are likely to make mistakes that result in negative outcomes. We shift the conversation in the literature from examining the effectiveness of mistake responses toward exploring why leaders use different mistake recovery methods. We employ an online experimental method to distinguish between task and relationship mistakes for leaders and suggest that different attributions are made for these two types of mistakes (Study 1). We found that task mistakes are viewed by leaders as more specific and less personal, and that relationship mistakes are viewed as more global, describing the leader’s stable characteristics rather than a specific event. From these findings, we predict that leaders are more likely to apologize for task mistakes and are more likely to justify their relationship mistakes rather than admit wrongdoing for them. We find support for these predictions using a mixed methods approach, employing a laboratory experiment (Study 2) and a critical incident method surveying a panel of leaders (Study 3). As such, this paper extends our understanding of the mistake recovery process for leaders by demonstrating that 1) leaders’ relationship mistakes are viewed as more globally representative of the leader than task mistakes, and 2) leaders are more likely to apologize for task mistakes but more likely to justify relationship mistakes. Relational and task mistakes, however, were not found to be different in regard to their ambiguity or the extent to which they were viewed as a mistake.     

Flag errors in soccer games: the flash-lag effect brought to real life

In soccer games, an attacking player is said to be in an offside position if he or she is closer to the opponents' goal line than both the ball and the second-to-last defender. It is an offence for the attacker to be in an offside position and in active play at the moment a fellow team member plays the ball. Assistant referees often make mistakes when judging an offside offence, probably because of optical errors arising from the viewing angle adopted by them (Oudejans, Verheijen, Bakker, Gerrits, Steinbrückner, Beek, 2000 Nature 404 33). Looking more closely at Oudejans et al's data, we show evidence that the flash-lag effect may contribute significantly to these mistakes. Participation of the flash-lag effect in assistant referees' misjudgments would take this perceptual phenomenon from laboratory setups to a real-life situation for the first time.     

Emotions Know Best: The Advantage of Emotional versus Cognitive Responses to Failure

Making mistakes or failing at tasks is a common occurrence in human life. People can respond to and cope with failure in many ways. In this research, we examine potential advantages of relatively emotional (versus cognitive) responses to failure. In particular, we study how effort and time spent in subsequent tasks depend on whether people predominantly focus on their emotions or their cognitions as they respond to a failure. We demonstrate that, left to their own means, people's cognitions upon a failure are mainly justificatory in nature and thus do not automatically have the commonly believed reflective, self‐improving qualities. We further argue and demonstrate that a relative focus on cognitions following a failure can prevent improvement in subsequent episodes, but a focus on emotions can allow for learning and, therefore, increased effort. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Failure, mistakes, regret and other subjugated stories in family therapy

This paper discusses the notions of failure and mistakes in family therapy, arguing that there are insufficient accounts in the literature which reflect the untidiness and disorder of everyday practice. The idea of dominant and subjugated stories is invoked to map the influence of notions of failure upon family therapy practice. It is argued that our practice would benefit if more accounts of our work routinely included stories of failure, mistakes and regret.     

Effective ways to dispose of unwanted time and money with a laboratory computer

Four general types of mistakes are presented that are commonly made in choosing, purchasing, and setting up a laboratory computer. These are: avoiding advice, building your own hardware, buying from a fly-by-night manufacturer, and being ignorant of your machine.     

Reconsidering a transplant: A response to Wagner

Nils-Frederic Wagner takes issue with my argument that influential critics of “transplant” thought experiments make two cardinal mistakes. He responds that the mistakes I identify are not mistakes at all. The mistakes are rather on my part, in that I have not taken into account the conceptual genesis of personhood, that my view of thought experiments is idiosyncratic and possibly self-defeating, and in that I have ignored important empirical evidence about the relationship between brains and minds. I argue that my case still stands and that transplant thought experiments can do damage to rivals of a psychological continuity theory of personal identity like Marya Schechtman’s Person Life View.     

Multi-sentential category mistakes

Magidor (Category Mistakes, 2013, OUP) argued that category mistakes are infelicitous due to presupposition failure. The case for this position is strengthened by the consideration of a previously unnoted category of data, namely multi-sentence discourses in which category mistake phenomenology arises at the end of the last sentence, but arguably due to content contained in a previous sentence. This phenomenon is analysed in terms of the previous sentence giving rise to a presupposition that is shown to be false only in the last sentence.     

认知失败的研究综述：概念、测量及相关研究

自Broadbent等首次提出认知失败的概念以来,认知失败引起了研究者的广泛注意。认知失败是个体基于认知上的因素,使他们在完成那些平日中能够胜任的简单任务时出现错误。文章从认知失败的因素结构、认知失败与选择注意、持续注意等认知因素的关系,以及与人格特征等关系几个角度回顾了已有的研究,并提出未来的研究方向。     

Mind your errors: evidence for a neural mechanism linking growth mind-set to adaptive posterror adjustments

How well people bounce back from mistakes depends on their beliefs about learning and intelligence. For individuals with a growth mind-set, who believe intelligence develops through effort, mistakes are seen as opportunities to learn and improve. For individuals with a fixed mind-set, who believe intelligence is a stable characteristic, mistakes indicate lack of ability. We examined performance-monitoring event-related potentials (ERPs) to probe the neural mechanisms underlying these different reactions to mistakes. Findings revealed that a growth mind-set was associated with enhancement of the error positivity component (Pe), which reflects awareness of and allocation of attention to mistakes. More growth-minded individuals also showed superior accuracy after mistakes compared with individuals endorsing a more fixed mind-set. It is critical to note that Pe amplitude mediated the relationship between mind-set and posterror accuracy. These results suggest that neural mechanisms indexing on-line awareness of and attention to mistakes are intimately involved in growth-minded individuals' ability to rebound from mistakes.     

《四库提要》易类订疑

《四库提要》是研究中国传统学问的门径之书,张之洞誉之为“良师”。但其中也偶有疏误,本文 根据目验的旧刻旧抄本,纠正了易类提要的15条错误。     

Learning from others’ mistakes in capuchin monkeys (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Cebus apella</Emphasis>)

We investigated whether tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) learn from others' mistakes. We prepared three kinds of transparent containers having the same appearance: one that could be opened by the lid, one that could be opened from the bottom, and one that could be opened either way. Using each of the first two one-way-open type containers, the monkeys were trained to copy the human demonstrator's action to open the container and obtain a piece of sweet potato contained therein. After this training, the demonstrator showed the monkeys an action that would open or fail to open the third, two-way-open type container. None of the monkeys reliably opened the container by spontaneously compensating for the demonstrator's failure (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, the same subjects were trained to correct their own mistakes immediately after failure, before we introduced the same test as in Experiment 1. This experience did not result in subjects using the demonstrator's failure to produce a successful action. In Experiment 3, we placed two monkeys face to face. In this situation, the second monkey was presented with the container after the first monkey failed to open it. As a result, two capuchin monkeys capitalized on the partner's failure to correctly guide his/her behavior. Thus, the monkeys monitored not only the outcome of the others' action, but also that action per se. This result suggests that not only humans and apes, but also monkeys may understand the meaning of others' actions in social learning.     

Correction to: Deflationism About Logic

Journal of Philosophical Logic - The original version of this article unfortunately contains mistakes introduced by the publisher during the production process. The mistakes and corrections are...     

Reclaiming failure in geography: Academic honesty in a neoliberal world

Failure is a pervasive yet rarely articulated reality of being an academic. From grant rejections to fieldwork mistakes, this editorial introduces a special issue that engages with the notion of ‘failure’ within the neoliberal university. Highlighting the uncomfortable impacts of ‘failure’ across contrasting spaces and career stages, the authors explore its politics, power, and emotional resonance, as well as raising crucial questions of resistance, hope, and refusal within geography and its allied disciplines. Three key themes emerged from these 16 papers: (i) failure is embedded in the structures of the academy; (ii) failure is an inherent part of academic knowledge production; and (iii) failure is an experience that is not equally felt, but is contingent upon uneven power relations and positionalities. We situate the special issue within the context of the coronavirus pandemic and suggest that the failure of the university sector to cope with this existential threat has exposed the very worst characteristics of market-driven education. Ultimately, this special issue aims to push back against the fear and loneliness that ‘failure’ can create, in order to confront the neoliberal university. In troubling conventional models of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in academia, we conclude that refusing to accept the unrealistic expectations, impositions, and demands of the University-Industrial Complex is not a failure at all.     

Illusion of control: invulnerability to negative affect and depressive symptoms after laboratory and natural stressors.

We examined whether individual differences in susceptibility to the illusion of control predicted differential vulnerability to depressive responses after a laboratory failure and naturally occurring life stressors. The illusion of control decreased the likelihood that subjects (N = 145) would (a) show immediate negative mood reactions to the laboratory failure, (b) become discouraged after naturally occurring negative life events, and (c) experience increases in depressive symptoms a month later given the occurrence of a high number of negative life events. In addition, the stress-moderating effect of the illusion of control on later depressive symptoms appeared to be mediated in part by its effect on reducing the discouragement subjects experienced from the occurrence of negative life events. These findings provide support for the hopelessness theory of depression and for the optimistic illusion-mental health link.     

Social genomics: genomic inventions in society. The nature of what's to come

This paper identifies several kinds of intellectual mistakes that proponents of genetic engineering make, in defending their views and characterizing the views of their opponents. Results from research in the social sciences and humanities illuminate the nature of these mistakes. The mistakes themselves play a role in allowing proponents to gather support from other protagonists in the social controversies involving science and technology. Understanding the controversies requires understanding that innovations are components of complex and ill-structured social problems; the "right answer" does not follow from scientific or technological breakthroughs. If the problems are identified correctly, issues of non-economic or non-market values and political and individual rights will need to be addressed.     

Mistakes as a social construct: an historical approach.

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) published To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System in November 1999. The report focused public attention on the errors that occur within the medical system that cause death and harm to patients. It outlined a series of changes for health care that are aimed at reducing these errors by 50 percent over the next five years.This paper examines the problem of medical mistakes historically. It documents how legal, scientific, and medical trends during the years 1890-1934 intersected to effect the reporting of mistakes in the subspecialty of neurosurgery. At the start of this timeframe, mistakes were reported openly in journal articles as an educational tool. By its end, however, mistakes had gone "underground" and were buried amid a more objective, scientific reporting system. Using this historical perspective as a baseline, the paper concludes by re-examining the IOM's suggestions for change and comments on what they mean for the culture of medicine.     

Correction to: Agglomerative Algebras

Journal of Philosophical Logic - The original version of the article unfortunately contained a few mistakes.     

Medical malpractice, mistake prevention, and compensation.

Clinicians' fear of malpractice litigation is the most significant obstacle to the open reporting of medical mistakes. Without open reporting of medical mistakes, however, root cause analysis of mistakes cannot be done, thus undermining efforts to implement safeguards to minimize the occurrence of future mistakes. Efforts to prevent medical mistakes, therefore, must first directly address clinicians' fear of malpractice litigation. In this paper, we explore the relationship between the current malpractice system and clinicians' fear of litigation. Ultimately, we argue that both the prevention of medical mistakes and the goals of malpractice litigation itself will be better served if substantial malpractice reform is undertaken.     

骨科急诊患者诊治中的决策问题

在骨科急诊患者的诊治过程中,骨科医师应该区分病情的轻重缓急,抓住重点进行处理。采集和分析临床资料时,应把病史、理学检查结果与检验及影象检查所见结合起来。这样才能作出准确的诊断。在诊断或/和治疗中选定任何一项措施,首先要从病人的情况出发,应尽可能减轻患者的经济负担。总之,为了提高临床决策的效率和准确性,减少或避免各种失误,需要建立起一套合理的临床思维方法和科学的处理程序。     

``Mistakes'

A suggestion famously made by Peter Winch and carried through to present discussions holds that what constitutes the social as a kind consists of something shared – rules or practices commonly learned, internalized, or otherwise acquired by all members belonging to a society. This essays argues against the explanatory efficacy of appeals to this shared something as constitutive of a social kind by examining a violation of social norms or rules, viz., mistakes. I argue that an asymmetric relation exists between the notion of mistakes and that of the social. In particular, mistakes do not presuppose a concept of the social, but the concept of the social requires prior specification of a category of mistakes. But no such prior specification proves possible. The very notion of a mistake is so inchoate that it makes it impossible to provide the kind of regimentation required for a rule-governed domain. Thus, there may be recognized mistakes even in the absence of a unified system or common knowledge of norms.Later writers attempt to avoid Winch's over-strong assumption that something shared and internal constitutes the social but cannot. Extending recent work by Stephen Turner, I argue that ``the social' is not a domain that is susceptible to lawlike treatment, but rather a heterogeneous, motley collection. For absent the assumption of a shared something, no social object exists to be explained. So, I conclude, we have at present no clear way of marking out the social as a coherent or unified domain of inquiry.