Shifting responsibility strategies : apology in Saudi Arabia

Abstract EN

We examined the apologies of 370 Saudi Arabian undergraduate students proportionally selected from the five regional universities of the Kingdom to determine the types and sequencing of strategies they used most often to apologize.

The study relied on ethnographic observation and a version of the Discourse Completion Test “DCT,” written in Standard Arabic, that contained 12 hypothetical situations in which a student had committed violations involving people of different social parameters.

The results revealed that apologies in Saudi Arabian culture typically shift responsibility away from the offender as Saudis do not like to apologize outright.