The Blame Game: How the Hidden Rules of Credit and Blame Determine Our Success or Failure

FROM HIS YEARS OF EXPERIENCE CONSULTING to leading companies, psychologist Ben Dattner has discovered that at the root of the worst problems we confront at work is the skewed allocation of blame and credit. In so many workplaces, people feel they're playing a high-stakes game of "blame or be blamed," which can be disastrous for the individuals who get caught up in it and can sink teams and afflict whole companies. Dattner presents compelling evidence that whether we fall into the trap of playing the blame game or learn to avoid the pitfalls is a major determinant of how successful we will be. The problem is that so many workplaces foster a blaming culture. Maybe you have a constantly blaming boss, or a colleague who is always taking credit for others' work. All too often, individuals are scapegoated, teams fall apart, projects get derailed, and people become disengaged because fear and resentment have taken root. And what's worse, the more emotionally charged a workplace is--maybe our jobs are threatened or we're facing a particularly difficult challenge--the more emphatically people play the game, just when trust and collaboration are most needed. What can we do? We can learn to understand the hidden dynamics of human psychology that lead to this bad behavior so that we can inoculate ourselves against it and defuse the tensions in our own workplace. In lively prose that is as engaging as it is illuminating, Dattner tells a host of true stories of those he has worked with--from the woman who was so scapegoated by her colleagues that she decided to quit, to the clueless boss who was too quick to blame his staff. He shares a wealth of insight from the study of human evolution and psychology to reveal the underlying reasons why people are so prone to blaming and credit-grabbing; it's not only human nature, it's found throughout the animal kingdom. Even bats do it. He shows how our family experiences, gender, and culture also all shape the way we cope with credit and bl

Credit and Blame at Work CHAPTER 1

The Nature of Credit and Blame

The Beatles were angry and upset when they thought that someone else was getting the credit they deserved for their psychedelic eighth album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.1 They felt they had been underappreciated because Time magazine had described the record as “George Martin’s new album,” crediting their producer.2 Martin had famously played a key role in defining the band’s sound, and for this new album he had experimented with new techniques in sound mixing which contributed to its groundbreaking nature. Although the album went down in history as one of the greatest ever recorded, this story illustrates just how fraught credit and blame issues can be. Even the Beatles, despite all of their success and fame, had difficulty sharing credit.

Across all human cultures, and throughout all of human history, keeping close track of credit and blame has been considered vital. Many religions have concepts of a system of divine accounting, or a “book of life,” wherein God or the gods keep track of one’s good and bad deeds in order to determine reward or punishment, either in this world or the next. Even for people who do not believe in any such divine, cosmic, or karmic judgment, the principle that we should receive due credit for our good intentions or good deeds and not be unfairly blamed holds powerful sway.

 
THE HIGH COST OF CREDIT

So powerful, in fact, is our desire to receive due credit that we sometimes demand it at what might be considerable expense. A friend of mine, whom I’ll call Pria, took me out to lunch one day to ask for some career advice. Pria was preparing for an upcoming meeting with her boss, Larry, in order to talk about her future at the nonprofit think tank where she works. Pria had worked very hard over the last year and knew she was being underpaid in her role. She also resented that she had the same title as the two people who reported to her. As we discussed her game plan over lunch, Pria told me that she planned to begin the meeting by expressing her dissatisfaction with her title, and then to make a strong argument for getting a promotion. She would then talk about her compensation, which she knew from research about comparable organizations was about $20,000 lower than that of her counterparts.

During our discussion, it became clear to me that Pria cared more about the title than about the salary. When I asked her if this was the case, she readily agreed, saying, “I lose credibility with outsiders because I have the same title as the people who report to me.” But I was skeptical. In the more than twenty years I’ve known her, Pria’s charisma and intellect have impressed anyone she’s met, both personally and professionally. Her title wouldn’t have been more than a footnote to any conversation. I decided to press the issue, asking her if she could think of a single example of a situation in which she’d lost credibility. After thinking it through for a moment, she admitted she couldn’t. I then asked her whether she felt Larry valued her. This time she answered without delay, saying, “No, he doesn’t.” While Larry heavily relied on Pria to ghost-write articles and speeches for him, he never publicly acknowledged that she was providing most of the “thinking” that powered the think tank he had founded.

The real reason why Pria wanted the promotion had little or nothing to do with what she had called “optics” to outsiders. Instead, the promotion had everything to do with her feeling undervalued in her role by Larry, who had originally recruited her from a prestigious private-sector consulting firm. I asked Pria to make a hypothetical choice: Would she prefer a new, more prestigious title or a bump in pay that would bring her in line with her industry peers? In other words, would she “buy” a promotion if that possibility were offered to her? Thinking about it, she realized that the money would actually be much more beneficial for her than the new title. Pria had been “suboptimizing,” caring more about the perceived meaning of something—which, in this case, was the “credit” that a promotion would have symbolized to her—than about her substantive economic interest. Pria’s case is a good example of about how this bias toward receiving credit can play out in our work lives in our relationships with our bosses. Working for a boss who gives us what we consider to be fair credit is something that people are willing to “pay for” in a variety of ways. In my experience, having a good relationship with one’s boss—defined in large part by the fairness with which one’s boss allocates credit and blame—is actually as important as a 25 percent difference in salary. Many people are willing to forgo higher compensation in order to have a boss who makes them feel respected and valued. I often challenge my clients, as I did with my friend Pria, to consider the potential trade-offs between symbols and substance. However, for many of us, it’s hard to determine what is symbolic and what is substantive, and we can blame our innate confusion on evolution.

 
BRED FOR CRED(IT)

We are all vulnerable to falling into traps regarding the allocation and distribution of credit and blame because, as crucial as fair judgment is to us, disagreements about who deserves credit or blame are the norm and agreement the exception. Why is this the case? A good number of our default actions and reactions can be explained by human evolution.

In recent years, researchers in evolutionary psychology have made notable progress in explaining ways in which the survival pressures that ruled our earliest ancestors’ lives have shaped our thinking and our behavior: for example, why we gorge ourselves on fatty foods and sweets; why we often misperceive risks, as in the recent subprime mortgage fiasco; and why racism lingers even when we imagine ourselves to be equal-opportunity and enlightened. Many of our ways of thinking and behaving have roots back in the African savannah, and our tendency to overzealously keep track of credit and blame also began there.

This tab-keeping seems, in fact, to be a deeply hardwired feature of the animal kingdom. Consider the research conducted on chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys by two biologists, Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal, at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, who investigated how animals react to inequities.3 The scientists conducted a series of experiments in which the monkeys and chimpanzees could trade tokens—small rocks or pieces of pipe—for food. While some of the animals received bits of cucumber or celery in return for their tokens, others received tasty grapes—which might be the equivalent of a co-worker getting a promotion or a raise while you got, well, a piece of cucumber. When the animals, which had previously been quite content receiving celery, saw that others were receiving grapes, they literally turned their backs to an offer of a treat like cucumber. Some monkeys went so far as to toss the cucumber back at the researchers in fits of rage.

In addition to the analogy of relating to our compensation and our bosses that these primate cousins provide, we can learn lessons about how we relate to our co-workers from an unexpected branch of our extended mammalian family tree—bats. Researchers have studied bat behavior and discovered that bats, like humans, track reciprocal social relationships. One study focused on the aptly named vampire bats, which inhabit regions of Central America and feed at night on the blood of large animals.4 If a vampire bat misses a meal, it can turn to its “co-workers” for help. Once bats return to their dens each night, those lucky enough to find food that evening will regurgitate blood into the mouths of their less successful colleagues. What’s really interesting is that vampire bats have an innate sense of fairness and reciprocity and keep track of who has been generous and who has been greedy. If a bat has been denied a favor by a fellow bat, it will refuse to share with that same stingy bat in the future. As we’ll discuss further in chapter 4, people also pay close attention to reciprocal social relationships, and keep careful track of how they are credited and blamed by co-workers.

John Stacey Adams, a workplace and behavioral psychologist, developed equity theory in the 1960s to explain why and when workers feel they have been treated unfairly, and to predict how they will react when they perceive inequity.5 Adams found that employees seek to maintain equity between the inputs that they bring to a job (such as time, effort, and personal sacrifice) and the outcomes they receive from their employer (like salary and recognition). According to Adams’s equity theory, our innate sense of what is fair also relies heavily on a comparison of our inputs and outcomes with the input and outcomes of those around us. If we’re working our tails off and fail to get the promotion we feel we deserve, and at the same time we see that a lazy co-worker lands a plum position, there’s a good chance we’ll do something equivalent to turning our backs on, or even throwing the cucumber in the face of, our boss. When we perceive inequity, stinginess, or a lack of reciprocity on the part of colleagues or the organizations we work for, we are much less likely to collaborate and much more likely to try to find ways to somehow right the wrongs that we feel have been done to us.

 
BLAME YOUR BRAIN

Due to the much greater and more numerous threats to survival that our ancestors were subject to, our brains have evolved to make quick, unconscious decisions. They have also evolved to simplify matters in order to facilitate a speedy response in the face of too much information. Over time our species was wired to use mental shortcuts, such as relying on past experience to judge future outcomes, and the result has been that our perceptions are influenced by what psychologists call cognitive illusions. These are subconscious mental maps that often get in the way of accurate or rational assessments. As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert writes in his book Stumbling on Happiness: “We feel as though we are sitting comfortably inside our heads, looking out through the clear glass windshield of our eyes, watching the world as it truly is. We tend to forget that our brains are talented forgers, weaving a tapestry of memory and perception whose detail is so compelling its inauthenticity is rarely detected.”6

We are also a good deal less in command of our thoughts, and our actions, than we tend to believe we are. One illuminating study even showed that when we perceive we are making a conscious decision, our unconscious brain is way ahead of us. The researchers found that they could predict if a subject was going to press a button or not a full seven seconds before the subject reported having made the decision.7 While this kind of experiment has yet to test when we unconsciously make decisions about credit and blame before we are aware we have done so, the implications are clear—our subconscious is in the driver’s seat.

We still have our ancient brains, and they may be driven to perceive and act without reflection. This is why in the middle of a particularly complicated or emotional situation, such as an imminent layoff at the office, we and our co-workers may act like we stepped right out of the Stone Age.

One way in which our evolutionary programming leads us astray is that trustworthiness and fairness have become so important to us that we have come to prioritize fairness even when it conflicts with our “rational” self-interest. This is demonstrated powerfully by something called “the ultimatum game,” an experiment designed by German economists in 1982.8 Two players are given a sum of money and told to split it up between them. One player is given the power to split the money and to decide how much he and the other player will get. The other player then has the chance to either accept or reject the offer. If the second player decides to reject the offer, neither player receives anything. Rationally, the second player should accept any offer he is given; at least he’ll receive something. But what researchers who have conducted this experiment countless times in cultures all around the world have found is that when the offers slide out of balance, moving from a fifty-fifty split to, say, an eighty-twenty one, the second player will reject the offer. Just like the capuchin monkeys who threw their cucumbers after grapes caused wrath, people would rather receive nothing than be subject to a raw deal. Our emotional primate hardwiring trumps our rational economic self-interest.

Another way in which our brains distort our perceptions and behavior is by leading us to give ourselves more credit for successes than we’re due and to downplay our responsibility for failures. This behavioral trait was termed “beneffectance” by psychologist Anthony Greenwald,9 derived from the combination of “beneficence,” doing good, and “effectance,” or competence. He defined it as “the tendency to take credit for success while denying responsibility for failure.” A number of studies have shown that people, particularly Westerners, overcredit themselves for everything from how much they have contributed to group efforts to their skill at public speaking to how much they will be missed at a social event they can’t attend. Studies have also shown that if you ask each member of a work group to estimate what percentage of the group’s work output he or she contributed, the total adds up, like the fictional shares sold in the Broadway musical The Producers, to much more than 100 percent.

Most of us also have wildly optimistic views of our futures, where we believe that due to our interpersonal skills and intellectual gifts, we are more likely than our peers to have a happy marriage or a successful career. Psychologists term this trait illusory superiority, a cognitive bias where people overestimate their positive qualities and underestimate their negative ones. It may be better known as the Lake Wobegon Effect, inspired by the fictional town where, according to Garrison Keillor, “all the children are above average.” Keillor’s point, of course, is that everyone tends to see him- or herself as above average. As the psychologist Steven Pinker writes in The Blank Slate:

 

People consistently overrate their own skill, honesty, generosity, and autonomy. They overestimate their contribution to a joint effort, chalk up their successes to skill and their failures to luck, and always feel that the other side has gotten the better deal in a compromise. People keep up these self-serving illusions even when they are wired to what they think is an accurate lie detector. This shows that they are not lying to the experimenter but lying to themselves. For decades every psychology student has learned about “cognitive dissonance reduction,” in which people change whatever opinion it takes to maintain a positive self-image.10

 

As Bertrand Russell noted: “Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed in a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.”11

Ironically, it is often the least talented among us who are the most likely to overcredit their contributions and abilities. Consider for example a study of college students conducted in 1999 by Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University.12 The researchers tested the students for their aptitude in logic, grammar, and humor, and then asked the students to self-rank—to guess at how the...