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.

"Catastrophe Award" for Excuses

ABC news reported on its web site of May 29, 2012 a story about an 8-year-old Arizona girl whose school presented her with a “Catastrophe Award” for apparently having the most excuses for not turning in homework. The award looked like a colorful card, and contained the following message: “You’re Tops! Catastrophe Award.  Awarded to Cassandra Garcia. For Most Excuses for Not Having Homework.” The teacher signed the card “Ms. Plowman,” added the date – May 18, 2012 – and even included a smiley face.

While I agree that students should not be allowed to hide from their responsibilities and failures, the sarcasm seems unnecessary. The mother, understandably, took umbrage.

During an interview with ABC TV affiliate KGUN-TV in Tuscon, the mother, Christina Valdez, is quoted as saying the teacher announced the award in front of the entire class, and the other students laughed at her daughter. When she contacted the school to complain, the principal “blew me off,” Valdez added. “She said it was a joke that was played and that the teachers joke around with the children.” But Valdez told KGUN that she didn’t find any of it funny.

Valdez believes her child was humiliated by her teacher. The mother in her videotaped interview seemed to miss the whole point. She thought the award was “cruel” and that “I think it’s cruel and no child should be given an award like this. It’s disturbing.” It was not clear if the mother recognized that she might have been derelict in her parental obligations for monitoring the child’s school progress. The mother did have her daughter enrolled in an after-school homework assistance program, apparently for a good reason that was not explored in the news report.

 It was also not clear if there was a father on hand or what he might have thought. Given the huge number of fatherless homes in this country, it is a good bet no father was around.

The mother claimed she did not know the girl was failing to do homework. Why not? She could easily have uncovered the falsehood just by asking to see her daughter’s homework. Did she know what was going on in the after-school homework assistance program?

However, having been the father of excuse-making children, I know first-hand that kids will often say they don’t have any homework assigned, when in fact they do. Teacher-parent conferences or even a simple note of inquiry to the teacher is an obvious way to check. My point is that it should not be the teacher’s job to track down all parents and tell them individually how each student is performing homework. Teachers have far too many demands on them as it is. Too many parents treat teachers as baby sitters.

The point is you can expect most kids to make excuses and many cannot be trusted to always tell the truth. Parents must confront their kids about excuse-making and lying. Children may not change as a result, but at least they learn their con is seen for what it is.

Kids don’t do homework for many reasons, and everybody would benefit from uncovering and remedying the cause. Maybe the child doesn’t understand the material, in which case the parent may need to tutor. Maybe the kid doesn’t find the time, in which case parents need to teach better time management, including perhaps restricting TV and the Internet and use of cell phones and electronic toys. Maybe the kid hates school, which is a problem that should not be swept under the rug. Maybe the kid is just plain lazy, in which finding ways to motivate are sorely needed.

But most crucial is the lying and excuse making. This is has a seriously corrosive effect on a child’s character if allowed to run rampant. The teacher and the school are right to confront excuse-making, although their methods are too heavy handed. The harm to the child is that they can get in the habit of making excuses, which is tantamount to failure to accept responsibility and to reap the benefits that would accrue from doing what you are supposed to do. Further damaging is that basic dishonesty is being reinforced when children are allowed to get away with such “little” deceptions. Little lies grow into big ones.

How do you make a child stop making excuses? First, show they are not fooling anyone. If they see their con does not sell, they will try some other tactic, or more hopefully, start doing what they are supposed to do so they won’t have to lie and make excuses.

Confronting excuse-making works with adult students too. I remember my struggles in graduate school with a stern-task master mentoring professor. Somewhere late in my first semester, he  called me to one side and said, “Klemm, you make too many excuses for failing to measure up.” I had not realized this was the case, but upon reflection I saw that I could do better work if I stopped making excuses and confronted my academic deficiencies. I did get better.

Source: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/05/8-year-old-gets-catastrophe-award-for-most-homework-excuses/