PsychologyAugust 16, 2026

exoneration

ig-zon-uh-RAY-shun

Definition

The act of officially clearing someone or something of blame, guilt, or responsibility for a past fault or failure.

Etymology

Derived from the Latin 'exonerare', meaning to unburden or free from a load. It evolved into its current legal and moral sense of clearing someone from blame.

In the news

The author notes that while older scientific methods are now considered flawed, describing the historical context of these research standards is an explanation for their past use rather than an exoneration of the inaccurate claims still being circulated.

A divorce-prediction equation was 90 percent accurate on the data it was built from, but when it flagged a couple as heading for divorce in a fresh sample it was right only 29 percent of the time, which is the trouble with rules like these

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ScienceBlog.com

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