Imagine your boss screws up – everyone screws up from time to time – but they blame you
for their mistake.
You could speak up, but most likely you’ll have to take the heat for something you never
did – or blame it on someone else below you.
This is often called the kick-the-dog effect.
It seems like this is a natural psychological reaction most of us have.
But that doesn’t mean we should do it.
This is the first episode of my Field Guide to Bad Behaviour.
Let’s take a journey into the wild to spot crappy behaviours and discuss how to manage
or avoid them.
In the challenge for survival in society, a human may use blame shifting, which is defined
as the act of attributing a personal failure to another human or event.
Camouflaging as an innocuous behavior, blame shifting is unusually pandemic over a large
area of the planet and plays an influential role in shaping the ecosystem of human relationships,
sometimes even causing chain reactions leading to the eruption of disasters.
Blame shifting is easy to spot.
It tends to hop back and forth over several entities.
One prominent sign to look for is finger-pointing.
You are more likely to find it alongside certain personality traits.
Pessimists and narcissists are more likely than others to ditch responsibility for their
mistakes.
Side note: It is important to note a highly perilous subspecies of blame shifting, called
victim blaming, which we’ll cover in a future episode.
Blame shifting can easily thrive in a closed small environment, but due to its highly contagious
nature it can spread in large organizations as well.
Researchers have found that when people are exposed to blame shifting by a politician
they are more likely to copy the behavior themselves.
In one study, participants were split into two groups and read a news clip about a failure
of former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In one group's clip, the governor took full ownership of the failure.
Though in the other group, the governor blamed special interest advocates for his failure.
Later when participants wrote about an unrelated personal failure, the group exposed to blame-shifting
were twice as likely as the other group to blame someone else for their own mistakes.
Researchers called it blame contagion.
When the spread of blame shifting is not controlled it becomes embedded in the culture of a group
and leads to lower creativity, reduction in innovation and bad performance.
It can even cause great consequences.
The Columbia Space Shuttle disaster in 2003, for example, is linked to an outbreak of excuse
making and finger pointing in NASA’s culture over a period of time.
Now people shift blame to protect their self-image.
But it backfires.
Serial blame-shifters are often perceived negatively.
For example, research shows leaders and managers who ditch responsibility for their mistakes
are ultimately perceived as powerless.
But you can be better!
With careful actions, you can reduce the prevalence of blame-shifting.
The solution: take responsibility when you should.
While it might hurt at first, ultimately it will help everyone problem solve, cooperate
and develop mutual respect.
When it’s not your responsibility, prevent contagion by being more intentional about
what you say publicly and privately.
Think of giving praise for a job well done publicly, and offer constructive criticism
in private.
The human ecosystem can be a dangerous environment to navigate – overpopulated with bad behaviours.
So please endeavour to take necessary precautions and make sure you have the right equipment
with you: mainly thoughtfulness, intelligence and knowledge.
Until next time.