Why We Hate to Accept Blame

Why is it so hard to take responsibility for our errors? Of course, the obvious and somewhat glib answer is that our ego gets in the way. But there is more to it than that. Recent experiments show that one undiscovered basic cause involves our sense of agency, that is, our sense of being responsible for what we choose to do (1).

Only recently have scientists started to spend much effort on understanding human agency (2). I discovered this to my dismay when recently asked to write a book chapter on the subject. It is hard to write knowingly on any subject when not much is known. Of course agency and sense of agency are two different things, and here we are concerned with how people perceive how much control they have over their lives. Given the growing dependency on government in this country, a likely prediction is that more and more people will surrender to the belief that they can’t do much about their lives. Research has shown that a person’s sense of agency depends on how many options they have to choose from (3). Options shrink when government or anything else constrains your range of choices. Moreover, another study showed that people believe that they have more self-control than others (4), which might explain why so many politicians treat the public as helpless and in need for a government nanny.

Anyway, on the point of accepting blame for one’s failings or mistakes, it seems that people claim ownership of their actions more readily when the outcomes are positive. Negative outcomes from their deeds are associated with less ownership and sense of responsibility. The most recent experiments had a primary focus on our sense of time in association with voluntary actions. The experimental design was based on prior evidence that the perceived estimate of time lag between when we do something and when we think we did it is an implicit index of our sense of ownership. Investigators asked people to press a key, which was followed a quarter of a second later by negative sounds of fear or disgust, positive sounds of achievement or amusement, or neutral sounds. The subjects were then asked to estimate when they had made the action and when they heard the sound. Timing estimation errors were easily measured by computer.

Subjects sensed a longer time lag between their actions and the consequences when the outcome (the sound) was negative than when it was positive. The interpretation is that with positive outcomes, the subjects sensed a more direct connection between what they did and their action of button pressing. With negative outcomes, subjects wanted to put more distance (time in this case) between what they did and the outcome. This seems like a rather indirect way to assess sense of agency, but we must await a cleverer and more direct way to measure it.

In any case, such experiments support our intuition that ownership of what we do can be affected by whether or not things turn out well. In other words, we have a self-serving bias to take more credit for when things turn out well than when they don’t. When they turn out badly, we want to insulate ourselves from responsibility and put blame elsewhere. Of course, we probably already knew that, but now we have objective experimental ways to study and perhaps manipulate sense of agency. Parents and social pressures don’t always succeed in teaching people to accept blame when it is due. This problem is likely to continue to get worse as more and more children lack responsible parents or even a father and a stay-at-home mom in the home. Maybe there are more systematic ways to train people to recognize how the consequences of their deeds affect their sense of responsibility.

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1.Yoshie, et al. (2013). Negative emotional outcomes attenuate sense of agency over voluntary actions. Current Biology. Dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub2013.08.034

2.  David, N. (2012)/ New frontiers in the neuroscience of the sense of agency. NCBI. Retrieved Oct. 2, 2013 from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3365279.

3. Barlas, Z., and Obhi, S. S. (2013). Freedom, choice, and the sense of agency. Frontiers in Human Neurosience. August 29. Doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00514

4. Pronin, E, and Kugler, M. B. (2010). People believe they have more free will than others. PNAS. 107 (52), 22469-22474.

Learning to Make Bad Choices

Every day, people make choices among options they may have never experienced. Yet, they can make such choices rapidly, even confidently—yet unwisely. Whether good or bad, the choices are likely to be biased from past learning conditions,

Research is now clarifying how biased choices are made. All choices, biased or not, are influenced by the values we place on alternative choice options. If a past choice led to a good outcome, people are biased to make that choice again because a positive value has been attached to it.

If in a current situation where there is no past relevant experience, we can still make a choice easily. To do that, we must be able to assign positive value to the choice made. But how can that be done in the absence of past experience? It now appears from recent experiments that such decisions can guided by past memory associations.

Memories certainly modulate value assignment and thus decision-making. In one recent study, brain-scan imaging of humans has revealed that giving people monetary rewards activates a pre-established network of memories that spread the positive value of reward to non-rewarded items stored in memory. This creates a bias for later decisions to choose non-rewarded items.

As an aside, the study revealed that a key structure involved in memory formation, the hippocampus, predicts choice bias. It appears that activity in the hippocampus, as revealed in brain scans, helps to spread the reward value among memories of items that had never been rewarded, and thus bias future choices for these non-rewarded items.

The rationale for the study began with the authors’ realization of how the hippocampus helps to form memories. It encodes relationships between items and events to form a remembered association. Later, when an item is recalled, the hippocampus can automatically reactive the neural representation of the associated item. Here then might be a way that the hippocampus could re-allocate reward value when a past situation is recalled.

The choice task had three stages. First, the subjects had to learn association between paired items. They were shown a series of pairs of images, first one and then the other. Next was a reward phase, in which half of the second stimuli were rewarded with money. Thus, subjects  unconsciously learned a response to value those stimuli that were directly rewarded.  The researchers expected that the non-rewarded member of the pair might pick up some value by virtue of being associated with the rewarded member of the pair. If so, a bias might have been created for these non-rewarded items in future choice situations. Indeed, that is what they found in a later test in which only the first member of each pair was presented and subjects were asked to pick the preferred items. If no transfer of value had occurred in the prior learning, the choices would have been evenly divided. But that is not what was found. Subjects more often than chance preferred the stimuli that had previously been paired with a rewarded second stimulus.

Why is this important to the issue of blame? This issue was never considered by the authors. But to extrapolate from the experiment, we could conclude that sometimes we may blame a bad choice on the wrong cause. The real cause may have been our own bias for making a bad choice, in which we had erroneously assigned value on the basis of some past associations with experiences that were rewarded. That bias may have been created by some past experiences in which we had inappropriately assigned a high value to certain choice options that did not deserve such value.

So, for example, we might have had a past experience in which a good thing happened at the same time as other events which had no learned value or even negative value. But the value of the good thing spreads to bias attitudes toward the other events. In the future, in a different circumstance, we might unwisely choose the previously low-value option.

Here is a common example. Suppose we have a dear friend who we have found to offer a valuable relationship. We meet the dear friend’s associates, who may be unseemly characters that would make poor choices for us to value as friends. Yet, the value we attached to the dear friend spills over to the others and makes us less likely to be critical of them. Thus, we might start running with a bad crowd of people that get us into trouble. When we get into trouble, we likely will place the blame in the wrong place, without realizing it all started with the bias created in us by the value we had placed in our dear friend.

You can probably conjure your own examples. This whole process of learned bias can affect every aspect of our life. It is important for us to be more aware of our biases and the true value of our choice options.

Source:

Wimmer, G. E. and Shohamy, D. (2012). Preference by association: how memory mechanisms in the hippocampus bias decisions. Science. 338: 270-273.

Why We Shift Blame

Why is it so easy to blame others when things go wrong in our life, when we ourselves are part of the cause? Why can others see in our motivations and behavior what we do not?

Robert Trivers, a Harvard professor and one of the founders of sociobiology, asserts that blame shifting is innate, arising from the evolutionary advantage of making it easier to fool others if we can first fool ourselves. The case is argued in his latest book, "The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-deception in Human Life." The thesis is that if we can deceive ourselves, then we can more convincingly deceive others, for they are more likely to conclude that we are firm in our convictions and assertions and thus less likely to be lying.

So where is the advantage in lying and deceiving others? It lies in the ability to more effectively hide our flaws and manipulate others. Life, in this view, is one continuous "Survivor Island" where one succeeds only to the extent that others can be fooled.

Trivers himself had plenty of years to think about blame and self-deception. Introspection became inevitable in his 68 years of trying to cope with bipolar disorder, multiple mental breakdowns requiring hospitalization, and social conflicts (including jail time).

I don't know where he got the idea to link self-deception with evolution, but no doubt it came from his early career exposure to pioneering evolutionists such as  E. O. Wilson and Ernst Mayer, who was in fact his Harvard mentor. Apparently also influential were the ideas expressed in "The Selfish Gene," by Richard Dawkins. Not only did our genes evolve to benefit the individual, but the selection pressure also favored genes controlling and protecting self image and sense of individual worth. Therefore, biologically speaking, our brains are biased to blame others rather than ourself.

Obviously, self-deception is counter-productive. It prevents us from correcting and preventing the real causes of our difficulties. This then is the conundrum. By fooling ourselves we do indeed make it easier to fool others, while at the same time paying the price of not solving our real problems.

So why is deception so prevalent? First, self-deception gives the illusion of protecting the sense of self and its hypersensitive ego. Secondly, if you are a skilled liar, fooling others probably works more often than it fails. It is still a Faustian bargain with our inner devil and a stupid way to live.

Sources:

1.  Kupferschmidt, K. 2011. Sharp Insights and a Sharp Tongue. Science. 334: 589-591.

2.  Trivers, R. (2011). The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceipt and Self-deception in Human Life. New York: Basic Books.