Baseball fans will always remember 2004 as the season that the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time since 1916 and finally broke "The Curse of the Bambino." What they won't think about so much, says researcher Carey Morewedge, is why they blamed Babe Ruth in the first place, as opposed to blessing the spirit of Sox legend Ted Williams.
It's the same reason you're more likely to think your computer is out to get you when it crashes or that your karma made it rain on your wedding day than attributing those same agents if your computer functions great or the sun is shining, Morewedge said. His paper was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
In an experiment last year, Morewedge found that people are more likely to assign blame for negative outcomes than praise for positive ones. His participants played a game that had either a really positive, a neutral or a really negative outcome based on how $3 was divided between them and a "partner."
The participants had to guess whether their partner - the one dishing out the cash - was a human or a computer. In the majority of cases where people lost money, they were much more likely to blame their bad luck on another human.
Why is blame our default setting? Morewedge said there could be several reasons, but a big one is that unexpected events are difficult to predict. And unpredictable things can be scary. That's why it can feel safer to assume that negative events are due to some external thing so you can avoid being harmed again. Morewedge said more awareness of this phenomenon could lead to better human relations. "Aside from an interest in understanding how people determine the cause of events and how that gives rise to superstition, I think this research is important because it describes how we ascribe blame for events," Morewedge told Discovery News. "Hopefully [this will] lead to research on how to undo these biases that may lead to the derogation of innocent parties and strife."Image from Flickr.
Tags: Current Events, Doomsday, Emotions, Folklore and Superstition, Myths and Legends
comments ( )