Why we blame others?
That day I was late for my meeting…
As usual, I woke up exactly at 8 am, finished brushing my teeth at 8:04 am, had a shower, and was already dressed by 8:45. Standing right in front of my favorite cafe, which is 3 mins from my home, trying to reorganize that day’s to-do list, while the barista was making the best cappuccino in Yerevan. According to my exact calculations, I should have been drinking my coffee at 8:55 and should have been at the office at 9:15. The meeting was going to start at 9:20.
The barista finished making my coffee at 9:00 and the whole time-pyramid fell apart.
If the barista had made my coffee faster, I wouldn’t have been late for my meeting.
But what if it was not the barista’s fault? Who promised us that the actions that we take every day and to which we are used to, are always right and always safe? Shouldn’t we be prepared for force majeure?
We are all an asshole, in someone’s story and we are all a paragon of virtue in someone else’s story.
So Why do we blame others?
Blame is defined as assigning the responsibility of wrong and false outcomes to someone else, other than us. We blame others for being late, for feeling guilty, and for being blamed.
Some would claim that blaming is an instinct of humankind others would argue that the secret of a mature society with balanced relationships is in a blameless mindset.
According to psychologists, blaming aka psychological projection is a defense mechanism in which the ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves and attributing them to others.
There is always a battle between what-we-know and what-we-feel
The research reported in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology demonstrated that the first step of not blaming others is self-awareness. The research suggests that the first step of a blameless mindset is taking ownership for failures and When you do blame, do so constructively.
Whenever facing a failure, our viewpoint is based purely on emotions. We continue to hold out hope that everything will turn out eventually fine, but everything gets even worse. We keep fantasizing about the positive outcomes and the it-could-all-be-better. We seek answers that could mitigate the naive certainty you once felt about the success and there comes the reason, that guides you away from the sense of putting yourself down. As the final formulated reason is the “saver” you start believing in it strongly, as you’ve never believed in anything before, putting away the heavy guilt from your shoulders and finally letting yourself breathe.
There is the question:
How to be sure that the reason formulated in your mind is constructive enough to project it on the others? And how to avoid blaming others, while at the same time, keeping yourself away from too much self-criticism and self-blaming?
