How blame works - and what to do about it

Guest piece by Dr Laura May

This week I’m delighted to present a guest piece by Dr Laura May, mediation and polarisation specialist, researcher, podcast host, and consultant (and open to opportunities!). Laura did her PhD on the dynamics and effects of blame in politics—something really important to understand in an age of blame-ridden campaigns like Brexit, Trump and others. In this piece she explores the dynamics of blame-driven messaging and what we can do to fight it.

Former US Vice President Hubert Humphrey suggested that “To err is human. To blame someone else is politics”.  It seems common sense that politicians blame one another; that blame, and avoiding or shifting it, is integral to politics.  But what effects does this sort of blame actually have, and what can communications professionals do to help counter it?

He deserved it - trust me.

The effects of blame

You’ll recall from Dr Bossetta’s recent guest newsletter on emotions and social media that anger is important in politics.  Research has shown that when we ourselves blame somebody, we feel angry towards them, and I wondered: does blame affect us in the same way when we are not ourselves the ones doing the blaming, like when a politician blames the EU, or migrants, or inflation instead of corporate profiteering?  Based on my doctoral research, I can tell you ‘pretty much’.  At least for the UK, when we are exposed to third-party blame people often get annoyed, which is surely on the road to anger.

Consider the following example of blame: 

Tom ate all Christina’s dumplings, and so there were none left for her.

Here, Tom is the ‘blamee’, the party being blamed for committing the evil misdeed of dumpling misappropriation, and we might feel angry or annoyed at him.  Christina is the ‘victim’, and we might feel sorry for her.  I—the ungrateful guest author—am the ‘blamer’. You might also get annoyed at me for attacking Tom or for providing shaky evidence.

See below: Dinner time with Tom.

This gives us three different results: annoyed at Tom (Tom is bad), annoyed at the author (author is bad), sorry for Christina (Tom is still bad).  No matter what the outcome:

• We feel bad; blame brings us down

• It’s inherently divisive; somebody is bad because we blamed them.

This doesn’t mean blame cannot be a social good—the criminal justice system is premised on blaming—but it does render it polarising in the political sphere.

So what can we do about it?

Much existing research looks at how politicians wriggle out of blame—but other organisations and strategic communication professionals find themselves underserved. The EU institutions are in a particularly tricky situation, given the EU tends to be blamed for things without a forum to defend itself.  And then there’s the situation of us as everyday citizens, who are exposed to blame in politics and want to do something about it, but feel powerless to do so.

Politicians after reviewing blame-avoidance research.

I took all this into account in my research, and because I don’t want Tom to yell at me (or eat all my dumplings) for exceeding the word count, I’m going to give you a quick summary in the table below. It considers:

• Methods of responding to blame

• The notable dynamics and features of the type of blame mentioned

• Where this method might be more or less successful 

I’m going to focus on when the EU is blamed by politicians—partly as it’s what I covered in my thesis, and because the complexity of that situation helps highlight limitations of who can use each tactic.  Let’s dive in.

*for more see Hansson/Hood/Weaver.

I hope you have enjoyed this brief overview; to learn more, I have several papers under review; you can request a copy of my thesis—it has a banging colour scheme—or feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.