This is, indeed, a “a natural part of human nature,” or, at any rate — a cognitive bias, i.e., a tendency to misanalyze information coming to us from our environment.

Fundamental attribution error — the tendency to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences and reversing this error when the behavior at issue is our own. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

Example: you come home late for dinner. YOU blame it on the traffic. I blame it on YOUR BAD PLANNING or LACK OF ATTENTIVENESS TO YOUR FAMILY OBLIGATIONS. Dinner is cold. You think I’m punishing you because I could have put it back in the oven as soon as you called to say you’d be an hour late. I had to put the kids to bed and didn’t have time to walk back into the kitchen, let alone get it back into the oven.

WHY do we have this cognitive tendency to blame PEOPLE when we’re hurt and blame CIRCUMSTANCES when we hurt them?

Because we can change the RESULT flowing from injury caused to US only if the “guilty” party can be persuaded to mend his/her ways. If my loss is PURELY CIRCUMSTANTIAL, there’s nothing for me to control. I can’t control the traffic, nor my husband’s client’s last-minute demands that keep him in the office late. He can’t make the kids easier to put to bed (well, not without A LOT of work!). It’s better for him to believe I can act better next time; not “punish” him and he’ll come home to a hot dinner.

That’s it. No one has ever quantified the number of intractable conflicts this cognitive bias gives rise to but I can tell you as a mediator that it ALWAYS plays some role in the parties’ belief-system about how evil, malicious, conniving, etc. the opposition is. And this belief derails more satisfactory resolutions than we can imagine. There is no case I mediate in which my job does not include trying to de-demonize and re-humanize the parties for one another.

Nice blog. Thanks for the links!

Best, Vickie

Peter Quinn