Discover more from Overcoming Bias
After the smoke clears, we begin to apportion blame. We have a natural tendency to try to shift the blame onto others, avoiding guilt and responsibility for errors. But there are some obvious problems with this strategy.
Errors are valuable training instances, and our bias against accepting blame reduces the number available. If we could externally shift blame while internally maintaining a rational apportionment, we would not be reducing our training data, but people don’t work like that. To be believable, our efforts to shift blame must be sincere, and so our brain engages in self-deception rather than partitioning. The result will then be to tend to underestimate the dangers of our action (and inaction) and underestimate the degree to which we can prevent bad outcomes by acting differently.
It is this latter point which gives the connection between blame and hope. For to avoid blame is to avoid responsibility, and to avoid responsibility is to disempower oneself. To say "I was not to blame for what happened" is to say "I could not have prevented it", which is to say "In future situations like that, I will be helpless".
So let us instead be honest about how we could have acted differently, even when things turn out craptacularly. We can trick our minds into doing this by focusing on the positive, forward-looking nature of responsibility: thinking about how we might do better in the future, rather than the negative-sum fight to divide the anti-spoils of the past. And reminding ourselves that some bitter blame is a small price to pay to hold onto hope.
With blame comes hope
When I make mistakes I blame myself. It is emotionally painful. A behaviourist would call it negative re-inforcement and wonder what behaviour becomes less frequent due to this negative re-inforcement.
Do I make mistakes less often? It doesn't seem to work like that. The behaviour that declines is that of recognising my mistakes. Not recognising my mistakes has the same drawbacks as recognising them but then blaming others.
Naturally mistakes should be collected and filed away as negative training instances. I do reasonably well when playing serious games of Go, intending to learn to play better. Over and above that one needs to be aware of the dynamics that ones emotional responses are creating. Both collection and filing are at risk.
And yet people with internal attributional styles (ie, take blame for all of thier decisions) tend to be the most depressed... I would suggest that people critically examine how things in thier life occurred so they can make wiser decisions in the future, but not assume that they could have known to act differently before-hand. The word blame implies a moral failing or weakness of judgement that did not necessarily exist.