When you make a mistake and admit it, it morally opens up the possibility of making new mistakes.
At some point in the last twenty years, the word “error culture” began to take off. It’s actually a marriage of two very differently connoted terms: a mistake is something negative, you’ve done something you shouldn’t have done, and if things go wrong, then small catastrophes or major misfortunes arise from a mistake. At the same time, the word spoken by the missing person also has a somehow exculpatory character. When someone says, “That was a mistake,” that sentence often involves admission (good), honesty (good), and learning ability (good). If, just as an example, Robert Habeck says: “That was a mistake”, then as an empathetic person you sometimes wish he would make (or take responsibility for) another mistake, because apart from a guilty young raccoon nobody else can look so contritely cute , when he accuses himself.