The Biology of Blame

I'd never heard this term until a few moments ago when I read it in Jeffrey Zaslow's "Moving On" column in today's Wall Street Journal.

His essay on the subject of blame is superb: it follows.

'It's All Your Fault': Why Americans Can't Stop Playing the Blame Game

The urge to blame is an innate human impulse dating back a million years or more.

It's an impulse that travels through our bodies to our fingertips, as we all saw in the frenzied finger-pointing over Hurricane Katrina.

Just as meteorologists and coastal engineers predicted the hurricane and flooding, there are "blame researchers" who foresaw the storm of words and pointed fingers that followed.

They weren't surprised when politicians, victims and the media angrily affixed blame for the inadequate levee system and deadly slow rescue efforts.

In fact, they see the tragedy through the prism of an academic question: Can our blame impulses weed out ineptitude, improve conditions, and save lives?

The answer: sometimes.

Other times, blame ruins everything, creating hostilities, scapegoats, and an avoidance of hard decisions that could actually solve problems.

"The human impulse to blame grows out of the evolutionary need to avert harm," explains Ohio University professor Mark Alicke, who researches "the psychology of blame."

If a group of early humans thought their survival was threatened because a member wasn't carrying his load -- hunting, gathering, whatever -- they'd point fingers, throw rocks, even commit murder.

"Just as we have appetites to nourish ourselves, we also have this predisposition to be alert about who is acting inappropriately," says John Humbach, a Pace University Law School professor who has studied "the biology of blame."

Of course, an appetite can lead to overeating.

Likewise, our instincts for self-protection can lead to overblaming.

The Bible is filled with finger-pointers.

After Eve ate the forbidden fruit, she told God that the serpent deceived her.

Adam blamed not only Eve, but also God for giving him Eve.

Modern America is beset by blame-mongering.

At ShiftTheBlame.com, you can buy a "calibrated blame-shifting device" (top) for $4.95.

It's a giant foam hand with the words "It's your fault!" on the pointer finger.

Run by East Bank Communications, an ad agency in Portland, Ore., the Web site offers tongue-in-cheek mantras: "You have everyone but yourself to blame." "It's not you, it's the printer."

The jokes ring true because finding fault is an American preoccupation.

We're a litigious society, obsessed with assigning dollar amounts to blameworthy actions.

For entertainment, we used to sing "Blame It on the Bossa Nova" -- now we turn to radio and TV talk-show pundits, who revel in blame games and accusations.

And we're fluent in the language of culpability: Ralph Nader was blamed for Al Gore's 2000 presidential defeat, because he siphoned away votes.

Your spouse is blamed if you're unhappy.

Our parents are blamed for everything.

The right to criticize leaders is a great gift of our democracy.

But this freedom to find fault means that even "acts of God" such as Katrina need a human face, says Eric Dezenhall, a crisis-management consultant in Washington, D.C.

"Every event must have a villain, a victim and a vindicator in order for our culture to understand it. History is calamity-driven, but Americans feel these things shouldn't happen here, and someone must be at fault."

Our blame culture is rooted in both nature and nurture.

We still succumb to primitive impulses: If we stub a toe on a chair, we'll kick it and curse at it, even though we know it's irrational to blame inanimate objects.

Meanwhile, from childhood on, we're schooled in the art of blame-shifting.

"Parents blame each other, teachers blame students, parents blame teachers," says Margaret Paul, a psychologist whose Los Angeles-based "Inner Bonding" program helps people tame finger-pointing tendencies.

Often, we blame because we lack the skills to problem-solve.

"Blame is about the past, and about words. Problem-solving focuses on the future and is about actions," says Cathryn Bond Doyle, a communications counselor in Medford, N.J.

She encourages executives to ask: Where do we want our company to go, and do we have the right people to get there?

It's more productive to evaluate and recalibrate than to mercilessly judge someone's past actions, or to demonize them, she says.

Ms. Doyle questions the timing of Katrina finger-pointing.

She uses a car-accident analogy.

While attending to the dead and injured at the scene, emergency crews don't hold hearings to discuss why traffic lights weren't installed.

"We always have to ask, 'What is the most effective use of our energy right now?' "

Still, the vociferous blaming over Katrina has led to concrete results.

Stung by critics, the Federal Emergency Management Agency chief resigned.

President Bush publicly declared that he took responsibility for government failures.

Because the crisis in New Orleans revealed the depths of urban poverty, "perhaps the finger-pointing will lead to an effort to rebuild all our cities," says James Morone, a Brown University political-science professor.

"I'm not sure the bickering is so terrible. In a sense, it's a fundamental values debate about the direction American society will take."

Of course, politicians may take the low road, pursuing what Prof. Morone predicts could be "a fight to the death in search of Katrina villains."

They'd all do well to consider an old adage: When you point a finger at someone else, your other fingers point toward you.

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Oh, how refreshing to read the above.

Tell you what: anesthesiology is a wonderful profession if you'd like to get over the tendency to blame and instead focus on how to make things better.

Because guess what: stuff happens for no reason, you learn after doing it for a few years; bad stuff, frightening stuff, life–threatening stuff.

If you decide to use your allotted five minutes (or less) after ventricular fibrillation begins to try to figure out what to blame instead of treating the problem your patient will die right there in front of you.

So I'm very nonjudgmental and often surprisingly incurious as to why something happens and trying to assign a cause and make the problem less likely to recur.

Because next time it's gonna come from an entirely different, unexpected place.

The nature of anesthetic disasters and my own quirky view of the world have led me to think that very little that happens is logical and therefore foreseeable.

A belief in things making sense leads to a lifetime of heartbreak.

There is a better way.

Things happen for their own reasons — not a reason.

Just that one small shift in point of view — admittedly not as easy to do as to try to do — can be transformative.

It was for me.

Trouble is, it took me a few decades to really believe it.