Table 4.

Percentages of parents endorsing supplied justifications for why learning to apologize is important (among subgroup of parents who consistently rated children’s apologies as important)

Transgression type	Intentional Moral	Accidental Moral	Conventional
Learning to apologize is important because…	(table includes parents who rated apologies as important in all scenarios)
Apologies are part of taking responsibility	86%a	65%c	76%b
Apologies help children understand others	86%a	87%a	30%b
Apologies teach that harming others not okay	82%a	62%c	33%b
Apologies help children admit wrongdoing	76%a	39%b	73%a
Apologies make other people feel better	54%a	64%c	18%b
Apologies help to clear things up	51%a	50%a	36%b
Apologies promote learning about fairness	36%a	15%c	79%b
Children need to know when to apologize	35%a	31%ab	27%b
I look bad if my child doesn’t give one	15%a	8%b	6%b

Note. The parents represented in Table 4 are only those parents who rated children’s apologies as important across all three transgression types.

Differing letters above percentages indicate significant Bonferroni tests (conducted only after initial ANOVAs were significant with alphas set at .005).