Blackwell Reference Online

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Excuses are a strategy used to remedy interaction that fails to meet social standards. Important work by Marx and Goffman, and later Sykes and Matza (1957), addressed strained social interactions, but it was Scott and Lyman (1968) who created the first sociological taxonomy for accounting behavior. They divided accounts into two types: excuses and justifications. Excuses are techniques used by actors to relieve responsibility following a social transgression. When an individual makes an excuse, he admits to the behavior but rejects responsibility for the behavior or its consequences. Other definitions of excuses include pleas for mitigation in judgment, claims of impairment, and shifts in attribution from an individual to something external (see Ohbuchi & Sato 2001; Schönbach 1990). According to Scott and Lyman (1968), there are four broad types of excuses. First, individuals may deny responsibility for an action by defining the action as an accident. A child might use this type of excuse when indoor play leads to broken household items, for example. Individuals may claim a lack of information as a second type of excuse. Actors claim they were either unaware of the true outcome or were not provided with enough information to behave properly. Fast drivers may admit to driving at a particular speed, yet tell a police officer they did not see a speed limit sign and could not have ... log in or subscribe to read full text