Why Do We Want Problems to Be Someone’s Fault?

If you watch man-on-the-street interviews about world issues, you might notice an interesting contradiction: people often struggle to define the problem with much clarity, but they can always tell you exactly who’s at fault.

Second, it allows us to believe bad things shouldn’t happen, at least not to ourselves. The thought, “this shouldn’t be happening” implies that something outside of natural processes caused the problem, which leaves little explanation but that someone is doing something they shouldn’t be doing. If there’s a bad actor behind it, you don’t have to co... See more

First, if you can convince yourself that a given problem is caused by bad people, then it means someone else is responsible for it.

Third, it makes solutions seem relatively straightforward: stop the bad people, or get rid of them.

This is a very human impulse, I think — to assign culprits to things that go wrong. When the economy is sluggish, it’s always due to bad policies and the bad people who make them, rather than hideously complex market interactions that even economists don’t understand.

Again, it’s not that there’s no such thing as fault, or that solutions never require holding a particular party to account. Only that there’s something about the human mind that wants a given problem to be someone’s fault, simply because it would be easier if it were.

So why is it so tempting to attribute everything bad to bad actors? I’m not sure it has much to do with solving the problem, or discovering the truth behind it. My guess is that it helps us process our painful emotions about the problem, in at least three ways:

As far as I can tell, interpreting problems as the crimes of clear perpetrators is the only way we attempt to justify real hatred for people. We need that sense of simplicity – the bad thing comes from the bad people — to hate a person or group without reservation, and history is full of examples.

Monitoring this tendency in yourself can be revealing – to witness how the mind generates suspects and verdicts within seconds, and how emotionally-driven the process is. It becomes clearer that villainizing is mostly a coping mechanism, rather than a sensible way of understanding or addressing problems.