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, addressed strained social interactions, but it was Scott and Lyman 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, they admit to the behavior but reject 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