Psychology of a chronic apologizer: 8 reasons some people say sorry to furniture they bump into, waiters who bring the wrong order, and everyone who was ever briefly inconvenienced by their existence

They apologize to the coffee table when they walk into it. They apologize to the mannequin whose arm they brushed going past in a department store, and to the chair when they push it in too hard. If somebody steps on their foot, they’re the one who ends up saying sorry about it.

Part of it is just a startle. Bumping into something sets off a small jolt, and the word comes out before the brain has caught up enough to work out what got hit.

That’s why it happens with furniture and doorframes and store dummies. The apology isn’t aimed at anything, it’s just the noise a startle makes.

But a reflex that goes off at a coffee table had to come from somewhere, and it doesn’t come from one place.

1. They come from a place where sorry is just how people talk

That’s true across Canada, Britain, Ireland, a lot of the upper Midwest, and plenty of immigrant households where deference was simply the setting everyone got raised on. In those places, sorry does the job that excuse me does everywhere else. It can mean coming through, or I didn’t catch that, or what a shame, or mind your feet.

It’s dialect, and somebody who grows up in it carries the vocabulary along wherever they move to.

In Canada it got common enough to turn into a legal problem. Lawyers there used to tell clients never to say sorry after an accident, because the other side could bring it into court as evidence they’d been at fault.

So every province and territory eventually passed a law stating that an apology is not an admission of fault and can’t be used to prove liability. Ontario’s came in 2009.

That’s an entire country apologizing so automatically that the courts had to formally stop counting it, which is a fair measure of how deep the habit goes when everybody in the room shares it.

2. They’re the newest person in the room

It might be week two of a new job, or a new country. Either way, they haven’t worked out yet which requests are free here and which ones come back with a look.

Every request costs the other person something, even if it’s only a moment. So people put something soft in front of it, and in English, sorry is the fastest thing there is. It works like a knock before you open the door.

The person who’s been there six years knows perfectly well they can just ask. The new one doesn’t know that yet, so everything gets a sorry in front of it, and by the time they’ve figured out the room, the habit has already set.

3. They were held to a higher standard

Karina Schumann and Michael Ross had a group of people keep daily diaries of every offense they committed and every offense committed against them.

Women reported apologizing more than men, which is what everyone expected going in. But they also reported committing more offenses.

Line the two numbers up, and the ratio comes out the same for both. Men apologized for the same share of the things they thought they’d got wrong. They just thought they’d got fewer things wrong in the first place.

A second study backed that up. When people were handed the same situations, snapping at a friend, waking somebody at 3 am the night before an interview, dropping the ball on a shared project, the women rated every one of them as more deserving of an apology.

So a chronic apologizer isn’t more willing to apologize. They just count more things as worth apologizing for.

4. Apologizing is the thing that calms them down

For some people, the word has stopped being social at all.

Tension starts building in a room, the sorry comes out, the tension drops, and the body files that away as something that worked.

A safety behavior is any small thing somebody does to bring the discomfort down right now, which has the side effect of making sure they never find out they’d have been fine without doing it.

Going back to check the stove a fourth time is one of them. So is rehearsing a sentence before saying it out loud, and so is apologizing.

The relief is real, and it lasts about four seconds. Then it’s gone, and the next bit of tension gets the same treatment, which is how something that started out as a way to cope turns into a verbal tic.

It’s also why telling this person to stop apologizing almost never works. They’re not being polite. They’re doing the one thing that makes the feeling go away.

5. They grew up in a house where a mood could turn

There was a parent who came home unreadable, and years of standing in the doorway reading the room before anybody knew what kind of evening it was going to be.

A child in that house couldn’t fight and couldn’t leave. What they could do was be agreeable and useful and easy, and be sorry before anyone had to ask them for it.

Pete Walker, a therapist, added a fourth to the three responses everybody already knew about. Fight, flight, freeze, and then the fourth one, the fawn response, which is the socially camouflaged one. That’s why it goes unnoticed for decades while the other three get all the attention.

The thing people tend to miss is that it worked. A kid who could defuse a parent by apologizing early wasn’t being weak, they were being effective, and a nervous system holds onto whatever works.

Then they grow up and move out and walk into a meeting where nobody is angry with anybody, and the setting is still switched on.

6. A job spent years drilling it into them

Six years of retail will do it, or four in hospitality, or a stretch in nursing or reception or cabin crew or a call center or a classroom.

In work like that, the apology arrives on day one as a line somebody hands them. Sorry about the wait. Sorry for the confusion. Sorry, let me go and check on that.

Then it gets rehearsed a few thousand times, and it gets graded.

Mystery shoppers note down whether it was used. Call reviews mark it against them when it’s missing. Somebody can spend six years being paid to apologize for things that were never theirs, including the rain and the traffic and a company policy they had nothing to do with writing.

Nobody hands them a switch on the way out, so the customer voice comes home with them and turns up at dinner.

7. It kept working on everyone they tried it on

Alison Wood Brooks and her colleagues at Harvard and Wharton studied what they called superfluous apologies, meaning apologies for things the person obviously didn’t cause. For the field version of it, a man went to a train station on a rainy day and asked strangers if he could borrow their phone.

Half the time he opened with sorry about the rain, and half the time he just asked.

Forty-seven percent of strangers handed the phone over when he apologized first, against nine percent when he didn’t. That was sixty-five people on one rainy platform, so it’s thin on its own.

But nobody ever sat a chronic apologizer down and taught them this. They ran the same experiment a few thousand times, on teachers and bosses and strangers, and the results kept coming back the same way.

8. Somebody close to them has never once said it

There’s a father who hasn’t apologized in forty years, or a partner who can manage I feel bad but never I was wrong, or a sibling who walks out of a room without acknowledging a single thing that happened in it.

Somebody in that family ends up holding the feeling anyway. Therapists call it carried guilt, which means guilt for another person’s behavior, picked up by whoever is nearest because the one responsible doesn’t feel it.

It explains the apologies that make no sense from the outside. Sorry about my dad, said to a waiter. Sorry, she didn’t mean that. Sorry about him, said fast, on behalf of a whole table of people who aren’t sorry at all.

They’ve been doing it since they were about nine, and they’re doing it still, because the alternative is sitting in a room where the thing that happened never gets acknowledged by anybody.

Back to the coffee table

All of the reasons have a person attached. A room to read, a boss to keep happy, a customer who might complain, a parent whose mood could turn.

The coffee table has nobody. Nothing to smooth over, no one whose evening depends on it, no audience at all. And the word still comes out.

That’s the part worth noticing. Not that they’re polite to furniture. That the habit keeps running with nobody left in the room to need it.