- You left the stove on too long and now your meal is burned.
- On your way out the door, your cat escaped outside, and now you will be late.
- While walking down the street, you slip on some fallen leaves.
When misfortunes like this occur to you, what’s your first thought? Do you immediately figure out who was at fault, other than you? Or you do resign yourself to accepting responsibility for such common mishaps that were under your control?
Not everyone is equally likely to engage in the blame game, but there is little scientific research to advise us on who is most likely to do so. We can, however, define a dimension of blame-acceptance by adopting a few simple principles: On the extreme Blame side of our scale would be people who can alwaysfind something else to blame: You could attribute the burned meal to your partner, who doesn’t help enough around the house, forcing you to multitask and forget the chicken simmering in the pan. You do not blame your cat for its misbehavior, but you might blame your neighbor who waved hello at just the wrong time. Slipping on the sidewalk as a result of your clumsiness? Of course not; people should sweep the leaves up off the ground before they become a hazard.
At the other end of the spectrum are people who blame themselves for everything, even when they’ve had nothing to do with an unfortunate outcome. This isn’t just false modesty or fishing for reassurance; some people do believe that they cause every bad thing all or most of the time.
It’s also possible, of course, to blame fate or a higher power, especially when there’s no one else who could conceivably have caused the outcome. You certainly wouldn’t be able to blame your partner, or yourself, for the devastating effect of a tree crashing through your roof in a storm (although maybe you'd blame your partner for not getting the tree cut down). Religiouspeople often attribute such events to a higher power who is either testing their faith or punishing them for their weaknesses.
Related to the study of blame is the social psychology of attributions. Blaming yourself when something goes wrong might relate to a general tendency to make so-called internal attributions for failure in which you see yourself as inept, foolish, or irresponsible. That tendency might motivate you to attribute your successes to external factors, such as fate, chance or luck, as well.
And there’s always the fundamental attribution error: People excuse themselves for the same negative behavior that they blame others for doing.
Another related area of research involves deciding whether someone who commits an immoral act is to blame. Consider what happens if two people each throw a brick off a bridge at passing cars. One person’s brick lands harmlessly on the road, but the other person’s strikes the people in the car, resulting in a serious accident. Theoretically, the person whose brick didn’t injure anyone is just as culpable as the one that did—they both had the same malicious intent. Moral luck is the belief that you should hold someone to blame only if the action causes harms to others, not what the intent was. You would therefore blame the accident-causing brick thrower more than the other.
Not everyone is equally likely to engage in the blame game, but there is little scientific research to advise us on who is most likely to do so. We can, however, define a dimension of blame-acceptance by adopting a few simple principles: On the extreme Blame side of our scale would be people who can alwaysfind something else to blame: You could attribute the burned meal to your partner, who doesn’t help enough around the house, forcing you to multitask and forget the chicken simmering in the pan. You do not blame your cat for its misbehavior, but you might blame your neighbor who waved hello at just the wrong time. Slipping on the sidewalk as a result of your clumsiness? Of course not; people should sweep the leaves up off the ground before they become a hazard.
At the other end of the spectrum are people who blame themselves for everything, even when they’ve had nothing to do with an unfortunate outcome. This isn’t just false modesty or fishing for reassurance; some people do believe that they cause every bad thing all or most of the time.
It’s also possible, of course, to blame fate or a higher power, especially when there’s no one else who could conceivably have caused the outcome. You certainly wouldn’t be able to blame your partner, or yourself, for the devastating effect of a tree crashing through your roof in a storm (although maybe you'd blame your partner for not getting the tree cut down). Religiouspeople often attribute such events to a higher power who is either testing their faith or punishing them for their weaknesses.
Related to the study of blame is the social psychology of attributions. Blaming yourself when something goes wrong might relate to a general tendency to make so-called internal attributions for failure in which you see yourself as inept, foolish, or irresponsible. That tendency might motivate you to attribute your successes to external factors, such as fate, chance or luck, as well.
And there’s always the fundamental attribution error: People excuse themselves for the same negative behavior that they blame others for doing.
Another related area of research involves deciding whether someone who commits an immoral act is to blame. Consider what happens if two people each throw a brick off a bridge at passing cars. One person’s brick lands harmlessly on the road, but the other person’s strikes the people in the car, resulting in a serious accident. Theoretically, the person whose brick didn’t injure anyone is just as culpable as the one that did—they both had the same malicious intent. Moral luck is the belief that you should hold someone to blame only if the action causes harms to others, not what the intent was. You would therefore blame the accident-causing brick thrower more than the other.
