Is blame bringing you down?

“You look like the world is against you”, remarked a more mature, and remarkably perceptive colleague one day when I was a (very naive!) postdoc. “It is!”, I replied grumpily, and I truly meant it. But that evening I looked back and rethought. The simple fact that these words have stayed in my mind ever since shows how important they were.
 
We all have occasional days when we feel this way, but in that particular period of my life a number of important things had not gone my way, most of them outside work. Somehow I’d got locked into this unhelpful way of thinking and it was this comment that shook me out of it.
 
All of us have more potential than our progress suggests. We sense it in our bones and look for explanations. Some of these lie within us, and some outside, but because of self-serving bias the outside ones are so much easier to see and more comfortable to think about. So we attribute explanations wrongly, exaggerating the roles of external events in our adversity. This makes us feel ‘better’ in the short-term, but comes at a serious long-term expense.
 
On days when we feel overwhelmed and everything falls apart, it’s hard to stop ourselves looking around for someone to pin ‘fault’ on: the previous user of the equipment we find broken, the administrator who hasn’t dealt with our request yet, the person who trained us but missed out one crucial detail, the reviewer who misunderstood our paper, the senders of our hundred unanswered emails – we have a long list to choose from. 

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​Our chosen scapegoats may not be perfect, but neither are we! We are, after all, the one who tried to cram an unrealistic amount into our day, despite years of evidence that no day ever goes quite to plan! To expect other people to attend to our needs instantly and perfectly, when they may also be overburdened or under the weather is simply unrealistic. And if a reviewer misunderstands our paper, doesn’t this mean some readers might also struggle to follow it? The need for us to clarify the wording is important feedback. But in our mind, it’s their fault, pure and simple!
 
Attribution errors sit alongside misunderstanding of emotions and heuristics in human thinking flaws, and scientists are no different. What roles does this play in making our research lives more difficult than they need to be? How can we get a better grip on reality to avoid this? And how do we avoid going too far the other way, blaming ourselves for everything? 

​What we are actually doing when we blame others is diverting attention from the only things we can truly change: our own thoughts and actions. Often these make far more contribution than we realise. But even when the explanation lies largely or wholly in events beyond our control – a difficult colleague, for example, or ever spiralling bureaucracy – we still have a choice in how we respond. Viktor Frankl’s book ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ described how, even in a WW2 concentration camp, it was still possible to “choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances”. If he could face the threat of starvation and the gas chamber this way, surely we can stop anguishing over an extra form to fill in!

​Trapped and powerless
The first way blaming others harms us is by robbing us of our own agency. We can try to change others as much as we like, but since they, like everyone, have self-serving bias, they are highly unlikely to roll over and reform in the ways we would wish! 

​And still less can we change what we perceive as ‘the broken system’. Shooting the messenger, who may be just as frustrated with it as we are, only makes things worse. And often we misunderstand the complexity and true purpose of ‘the system’, as argued by Dan Davies in his book ‘The Unaccountability Machine’. My favourite chapter in this book is the one which, in my view, absolutely nails why science publishing is the way it is. As every manager learns when their ideals flounder, designing the perfect system is a lot harder than we think.
 
All we can realistically do is to accept what we cannot change, and channel our energy into what we can. If we remain fixated on the roles of others, we distract from this and never learn and grow.
 
Even when we are a ‘victim’ of external events – a flawed funding decision, for example, or being ‘scooped’ by a well-funded competing group – building an identity of ‘victimhood’ only holds us back. Complaining about administrators in response to some impasse, for example, stops us learning about the genuine complexities of a university environment, the workload they may be dealing with, or the lack of appreciation they may feel, eating away at motivation. We may be better served by identifying the most supportive people among them, showing true gratitude for their efforts and focussing on our shared humanity and goals. 

Culture is what we make it
The second big problem with blaming others is we damage our workplace culture, fostering negativity bias and cycles of mistrust and revenge. Inventing a perpetrator to sustain our self-justification leads us straight into the quagmire of the Karpman drama triangle, previously discussed in these blogs.  It’s not just us who end up powerless and trapped as ‘victims’ in this dysfunctional interaction, but also our perceived ‘perpetrators’ and the knights in shining armour who strive to ‘rescue’ us, all endlessly switching roles with one another in the most unhealthy of environments. This plays out at a tribal level too, when we begin to ‘other’ those in different job roles, instead of appreciating that they, like us, may be struggling with overwhelm, a challenging boss or striving to finish their work for a strict childcare pickup deadline. 

Even if some colleagues do need some frank but constructive feedback, do we actually give it to them or do we simply sound off to our friends and family who can also do nothing about it?  Negativity, or an ‘us and them’ culture, ultimately brings everyone down, including ourselves, and we lose sight of gratitude, one of the strongest motivational forces in the workplace. Who wants to be in a workplace where everyone complains? 

What goes around comes around
Thirdly, the way we treat others has its way of coming back to us. This works in both ways. Genuine recognition that others also have to deal with ‘stuff’ – unexpected problems and interruptions that derail their day, job security worries, family or health issues – will be strongly appreciated by most people, especially as so many are starved of such appreciation. This creates goodwill and the potential for reciprocation next time we are the one needing a favour, someone to go the extra mile on our behalf. In contrast, if we unfairly pin blame on others, it feeds a natural desire for revenge that ultimately holds back both parties. 

Unlocking the trap
If we are too ready to blame others, we make ourselves powerless, learn nothing, degrade our culture, go to the back of the queue for favours and put ourselves under unnecessary stress as we ready ourselves for revenge attacks. That’s quite a price to pay for a short-term feeling of righteousness.
 
But nor does it help to automatically blame ourself. Causation is rarely a black-and-white issue. Psychologists describe having an internal locus of control as the key to feeling in charge of our destiny, and to a large extent this is helpful, including in research. But in its extreme it leads to pointlessly beating ourselves up and exposing ourself to victim blaming, which helps no-one. As ever, we need to find a good balance, looking at our own contributions to the issue first, but adding a healthy dose of realism about external factors, recognising that explanations lie both within and outside ourselves.
 
Whatever we are facing, it will always be our own contributions to it, however small, that we can do most about. If we can recognise these first instead of last, or never at all, we can finally begin to move ourselves forward.