Whose Fault Is It?

We have all experienced situations where something goes wrong.

Perhaps a scenario where a server crashes twenty minutes before a major product launch, or a marriage that quietly fractures across years of unspoken resentment.

Or what about a responsible and experienced driver who runs a red light at dusk?

And when things do go wrong, we almost immediately ask “whose fault is it”?

Assigning blame feels natural, and at times, necessary. After all, people do sometimes act recklessly, cut corners, deceive colleagues, or abandon commitments.

Now, of course, accountability matters. But our desire to find a culprit often extends beyond moments of deliberate wrongdoing.

Whenever life begins to unravel, humans instinctively resist the associated ambiguity. We want a distinct name attached to the wreckage.

The influential British Anthropologist, Mary Douglas published a collection of 16 essays on risk and blame in 1992. In these, she observes that communities rarely assess danger through cold calculation alone. Instead, cultural values, social hierarchies, and institutional traditions often dictate which hazards we ignore and who absorbs the blame when things go wrong.

In our modern world, organisations like to believe that compliance frameworks, performance reviews, and risk registers have replaced these human mechanisms.

In practice, however, modern tools often serve that exact ancient desire: pinpointing a scapegoat to restore a fragile sense of order.

Why Do We Look for Scapegoats?

Finding a culprit is useful because it simplifies complex events into simple stories that are easy to explain.

Social psychologists have long studied this through something they call attribution theory: examining how we assign causes to everyday events.

Stanford psychologist Lee Ross identified this flaw in human reasoning back in 1977, which has since become known as the fundamental attribution error. It describes how, when we observe another person stumble, we instinctively attribute the stumble to their character, intelligence, or work ethic while overlooking the environment around them.

For example, consider a project manager who misses a critical project milestone.

The natural tendency may be for senior leaders to label her as disorganised or lacking focus. But those same leaders often overlook other significant contributing factors, such as shifting client requirements, obsolete legacy software, an understaffed engineering team, or competing executive mandates, which forced her to juggle multiple conflicting priorities at once.

And so we judge the person because they are there in front of us, visible, whilst the surrounding system often remains invisible unless we are intentional about looking at it.

Why Blaming Someone Protects Our Peace of Mind

Psychologists Melvin Lerner and Dale Miller uncovered another deep emotional driver of this habit: our inherent belief in a just world.

Humans crave an orderly reality where disciplined effort earns rewards, and misfortune strikes only those who make foolish choices.

Of course, reality is usually a little different.

Even the most careful drivers encounter sudden patches of black ice. Dedicated and competent founders sometimes watch viable companies collapse under unexpected regulatory shifts. And even the most responsible and hardworking professionals can receive sudden layoff notices.

Accepting that bad outcomes happen to capable people forces us to confront luck, randomness, and our own vulnerability. Blame acts as an emotional shield against that uncertainty.

When we convince ourselves that a bankrupt neighbour managed his finances poorly or that a fired colleague lacked stamina, we quietly reassure ourselves that our own foresight will keep us safe.

The Illusion of the Obvious

Knowing the outcome of an event inevitably warps our memory of how that event began.

Psychologists Neal Roese and Kathleen Vohs describe hindsight bias as our tendency to treat past surprises as predictable occurrences once we know the final score.

Consider, for example, an industrial chemical spill. Safety auditors often quickly identify every ignored warning sign as obvious negligence whilst ignoring the fact that during the actual workday, operators faced thousands of competing alarms, flickering gauges, and intense production quotas.

Decision-makers live forward through thick clouds of uncertainty. Observers judge backwards from the luxury of certainty.

Evaluating decisions fairly requires reconstructing the exact information, emotional pressure, and limited choices available in the moment. A disciplined, sound choice can still produce a painful result, just as a reckless gamble can occasionally pay off.

This is important as workplaces often suffer when leadership confuses person-centred faults with system-level understanding.

Psychologist James Reason outlined this distinction in his Swiss cheese model of human error. Catastrophic failures rarely happen because a single individual made a mistake. They occur when vulnerabilities across multiple operational layers happen to align.

How Blame Silences an Organisation

Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson has demonstrated that blame-heavy cultures actively sabotage organisational learning.

When employees realise that honesty brings punishment, they bury their mistakes.

This has important organisational consequences as near misses go unrecorded and small operational glitches fester until they explode into public crises. A team reporting zero errors rarely operates with absolute perfection. More often than not, that team has simply mastered the art of concealment.

The reality is that continuous improvement requires psychological safety.

In other words, it requires an environment where professionals can surface problems, critique flawed procedures, and dissect unexpected failures without fearing public humiliation.

Blame vs Accountability

Adopting a more responsible and pragmatic approach to blame does not mean abandoning consequences where deserved.

Things like fraud, intentional negligence, abuse, and repeated disregard for clear standards obviously require decisive action.

The key difference, though, is that accountability is not simply about searching for someone to punish. Instead, accountability investigates why the safeguards failed in the first place and seeks to repair the underlying vulnerabilities to prevent a recurrence.

This is equally true in personal relationships.

When partners argue repeatedly, both often compile mental dossiers proving the other is entirely to blame. One partner withdraws because they feel criticised. The other partner criticises because they feel abandoned. Both fixate on finding a culprit while their shared destructive cycle continues unbroken.

In Closing

Until next time, remember to first pause before asking who failed whenever you see an initiative collapse, or a relationship in trouble.

Ask instead: How did our conditions make this outcome possible?

Dion Le Roux

References

1. Douglas, M. (1992). Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. Routledge.

2. Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behaviour in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.

3. Edmondson, A. C. (2011). Strategies for Learning from Failure. Harvard Business Review, 89(4), 48–55.

4. Kelley, H. H., & Michela, J. L. (1980). Attribution Theory and Research. Annual Review of Psychology, 31, 457–501.

5. Lerner, M. J., & Miller, D. T. (1978). Just World Research and the Attribution Process: Looking Back and Ahead. Psychological Bulletin, 85(5), 1030–1051.

6. Reason, J. (2000). Human Error: Models and Management. BMJ, 320(7237), 768–770.

7. Roese, N. J., & Vohs, K. D. (2012). Hindsight Bias. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(5), 411–426.

8. Ross, L. (1977). The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 10, 173–220.