story by L aure n Bryant illustrations by alix northrup
hink about the Garden of Eden story. You know how it goes: Adam blames Eve. Eve blames the serpent. God blames all three. In short, “the blame game commences,” as Ohio University psychologist Mark Alicke puts it. Actually, in Alicke’s view, the blame game is even more fundamental than the Eden creation story. It’s evolutionary. Blame, he says, is linked to the inborn capacity to evaluate, which an organism uses to decide whether something is beneficial or a threat to its survival. Borrowing terminology from legal philosopher Joel Feinberg, Alicke says creatures use blame to “stain” things, marking them as harmful. Blaming is an essential “adaptive strategy,” he says—reflexive and “primitive.” To illustrate, imagine you get out of bed at 3 a.m. to get a snack from the refrigerator. Just as you arrive at the fridge in the dark, you stub your toe hard. In swift response, you kick the refrigerator door. “That’s how primitive blame is,” Alicke says. Blame is simply “a very natural thing to do,” Alicke continues. “Telling people not to evaluate, not to judge, is like telling them not to be hungry or not to think about sex. I’ve always been doubtful about trying to get people to not do the things they do most naturally.” Being doubtful is an occupational hazard for Alicke. As a social psychologist, he’s professionally inclined to question the assumptions people make. He’s spent a good deal of his research career questioning the assumptions people make about themselves, a pursuit known as the psychology of self-identity. Human beings, Alicke has observed, routinely overestimate themselves as better than they actually are (self-enhancement) and work hard to maintain that illusion (self-protection), even “when reality sets in.” Alicke and Constantine Sedikides of the University of Southampton recently co-edited the Handbook of Self-Enhancement and Self-Protection (Guilford Press, 2010). Alongside these studies, Alicke has maintained a fascination with the psychology of blame. More than 15 years ago, he defined what he calls the “culpable control model” to describe how humans judge and place blame. At the time Alicke was developing his theory, most existing blame models were based in the legal realm and assumed that when we ascribe blame, we do so based on rational assessment. True to form, Alicke questioned the assumption of rationality. His alternative takes into account the impact of spontaneous negative (and sometimes, positive) evaluations. In Alicke’s view, our primal impulse to blame has a significant effect on our supposedly rational judgments—our desire to blame is automatically informed by our values and beliefs, and we justify the blame we place according to those feelings. In short, our initial estimation of a person’s blameworthiness prevails.
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