Why so many people blame their partners when things go wrong

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Your day started off pretty well when you started checking off some important tasks off your to-do list. One of those chores was rearranging a storage cabinet that contained your finest glassware that was used only for special occasions. The shelves were taller than you could reach, so you yelled at your partner for a hand. Your partner gives you a little nudge, but to your dismay, a cup falls to the ground and shatters into pieces. When you realize the damage is too much to repair, your mind immediately turns to the role your partner played in this whole debacle. “How could you let this happen?” You shout: “You should have been more careful!” “

Now think about the same situation but with a different ending. Your partner’s hold on you wasn’t so great that you reached the top shelf, but luckily the glass just tipped over to the side without falling. Do you still want to blame your partner or just express some annoyance about the situation?

The tendency to blame the result of an action turns out to be a complex process. As Gavin Nobes of the University of East Anglia and Justin Martin of Boston College (2021) describe, people judge the right or wrong of an action based on “morally irrelevant factors such as outcome and luck ”(p. 2). Your partner may have been careless in helping you reach that top shelf, but if your partner is “morally lucky” and the glass survived the incident, you won’t see your partner wrong. In other words, intention does not matter, but the outcome does matter in judging blame.

How do people allocate responsibility for accidents?

According to Nobes and Martin, there is a disconnect between intention and result. At a relatively young age, children learn to separate these two aspects of the allocation of liability for accidents.

However, when the third factor of negligence kicks in, all bets are off. What determines whether an unintentional accident is wrongful depends on whether the individual appears to have acted negligently. However, if no accident occurs even if the person is negligent, then that person is off the hook as long as there are no bad intentions.

The shattered glass case presents an interesting dilemma because, technically, you are the cause of the accident. However, because your partner was involved, your moral judgment apparatus may shift gears and it may become the target of your blame. Since this change can cause bad feelings, is there a way for you in the future to be more accepting of a similar type of accident by both understanding your own role and not turning your anger at your partner?

To answer this question, it is helpful to understand the moral judgment process as a combination of the factors of intention, outcome, and neglect. By manipulating these three factors across a set of two studies, Nobes and Martin posed one of many scenarios to their US-UK participants starting with this rod:

One fall afternoon, Cynthia comes home after having lunch. Her two brothers are in the car with her. As they approach their house, they see a very large pile of leaves on the side of the road, the largest they have seen all season.

The experimental manipulation consisted of providing the participants with one of the many possible endings, defined as follows; in each case, Cynthia feels two bumps as she walks through the leaves:

Original: Cynthia’s brother asked her to drive through the leaves. Not negligent: a car veers towards them and Cynthia had to swerve to avoid it and finds herself in the leaves. Neglect: Cynthia’s brother asks her to drive through the leaves and she does so, forgetting that children often play there. Reckless: Cynthia’s brother asks her to drive through the leaves and she does so, even though she knows the kids play there often.

The variation in the results of each scenario defined the final manipulation, as follows:

Positive: The bumps were two sticks and they did not damage the car Negative: The bumps were two children who were killed instantly.

When you came to the negative result you no doubt felt saddened, but did you think Cynthia was to blame for her negligence and should be punished? Or did you use the “moral luck” argument that fates conspired against her in the negative outcome situation and luck was on her side in the event?

According to the views of the undergraduate samples used to test the guilt judgments in these scenarios, when the children died, even without specified negligence, almost all (92%) ruled that Cynthia should be punished, and most ( 71%) inflicted a punishment for at least one year. Only a small minority (10%) blamed Cynthia when the result was positive. So, although the “intentions” were similar, Cynthia was only considered innocent if no child was killed by her actions. Moreover, based on the comparisons of the specific conditions described above, it turned out that people automatically assume that when the result is negative, it reflects Cynthia’s negligence.

So it’s clear that the data supports the study’s predictions that a negative outcome dominates people’s judgments about whether the morally ‘unlucky’ person should be blamed, punished, and viewed as negligent. There are two sides to this situation. What if the person was not at all negligent and therefore not at all to blame? As the authors conclude: “Whenever judgments regarding accidental agents are made, for example, in courts, workplaces, schools or homes, the counsel should be to seek and provide this information if possible, although there was no evidence that the officer was negligent.

On the other hand, if someone has been morally ‘lucky’ and the result is positive (or at least not negative), it may be necessary to remind those charged with the judgment whether the person was in fact negligent: “The agent deserves punishment as much as someone who was also negligent, but whose action unfortunately led to a negative result” (p. 22).

Behind all this reasoning, the authors explain, lies the question of choice. It was Cynthia’s decision to drive through the leaves. If all she touched was two sticks, then she was enjoying “moral good luck.” If she hits the children, then she is the victim of “moral bad luck”. The only way for Cynthia to escape the negative result is to have been forced through the leaves by the threat of the oncoming driver, or what is known as “brutal bad luck.”

How can you best judge your partner’s behavior?

All of this complicated logic can be difficult to unwrap, especially when your partner’s behavior leads to a set of possible interpretations. However, as the study by Nobes and Martin shows, it is too easy to be swayed by an outcome rather than intention to decide whether your partner is responsible for a misfortune.

To avoid the “moral luck” trap, remove negligence from the blame equation. Accidents can happen for a number of reasons unrelated to the actor’s negligence. They may also have nothing to do with intention. As tempted as you are to automatically assume that your partner’s behavior reflected a hidden amount of unconscious malice. In other words, doing a “Freudian slip” on your partner could lead to a bad example of finger pointing.

After trying to exonerate your partner for the first time, you might then wonder why you are so likely to have blamed your partner in the first place. Does your belief that your partner acted to hurt you come from the belief that your partner is untrustworthy or, worse, doesn’t really care about you? This kind of prejudice can lead to some kind of unfair blame that can only further erode your relationship.

In short, judging the cause of someone’s behavior is never an easy proposition. When it comes to your partner, the blame game becomes more than just philosophical ambiguity. Try to take a step back and look at your partner’s behavior and yours with a more informed and forgiving approach.

Facebook image: Prostock-studio / Shutterstock

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