Blame Contagion

When divorcing couples discuss why their marriage went bad or how the divorce is likely to affect their children, they often try to outdo one another in their attempts to shift blame rather than accepting responsibility.  And for couples whose goal is conduct an uncontested divorce on-line, tit-for-tat blaming is a sure-fire way to end up in a lawyer’s office.

Blaming others rather than accepting responsibility for one’s own mistakes simply doesn’t work. Studies find that people who blame others learn less from experience, lose credibility, and perform less well than those who take responsibility for their mistakes. The same applies to people working with others towards a particular goal, such as couples settling their own divorce, work groups tackling a specific task, or families planning a vacation. When such groups resort to blaming whenever they hit an impasse, they are less creative, less focused on learning, and less productive.

As research has shown, however, changing a culture of blame isn’t easy: blaming is like a virus, it is highly contagious. Findings published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology by psychologists Nathanael Fast and Larissa Tiedens, demonstrated that simply being exposed to someone blaming others for a mistake was enough to trigger people to turn around and blame others for entirely unrelated failures.







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