Human nature often seeks to assign blame when problems arise. But why is this so? Explore the psychological underpinnings of this tendency, its societal implications, and the potential benefits of shifting our perspective towards solution-oriented thinking.
My former job: traffic jam causer
When the economy is sluggish, it’s always due to bad policies and the bad people who make them
- The human mind is quick to attribute anything it doesn’t like to some foul group of people and their faulty morals
- For example, nobody thinks poverty is a good thing. If you ask people why poverty exists, you’ll usually get a quick answer attributing it to bad people.
Three Reasons Everything is Someone’s Fault
It helps us process our painful emotions about the problem
- If you can convince yourself that a given problem is caused by bad people, then it means someone else is responsible for it
- Allow us to believe bad things shouldn’t happen, at least not to ourselves
- Make solutions seem relatively straightforward: stop the bad people or get rid of them
Watching the mind make bad guys
You can observe how the mind generates suspects and verdicts within seconds
- It becomes clearer that villainizing is mostly a coping mechanism, rather than a sensible way of understanding or addressing problems
- A little curiosity on this front makes political topics less maddening to think and talk about
