Today, all manner of offenses are deemed apology-worthy and it takes very little squirming to dash off a tweet. But our response to these developments hasn’t been to calibrate our reactions accordingly; we seem to be demanding apologies as quickly as we dismiss them.

It’s an interesting paradox, said Karina Schumann, a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, who runs the Conflict Resolution Lab there. On the one hand, she said, we’re living in an age of accountability — where there’s a call for transparency, conversations about what’s right and what’s wrong and power on the part of the public to demand a response.

Amid that, it has become almost expected that public figures, and even not-so-public figures, be held “accountable” for even the smallest misdeeds. And yet that very expectation, she said, has raised the bar for what is considered “sincere” — which can water down the apology’s impact.