Over The Counter Culture

Just jotting down a thought: humans seem quite prone to, even perhaps hard-wired (since children do it a lot), to shift responsibility for ‘bad things that happen’ to others. At first sight, this seems strange, since you might reasonably expect people who recognise their mistakes and flaws (and are thus able to learn from their mistakes) to be more ‘intelligent’ (able to improve from past experiences) - you’d expect natural selection to select for self-improvers, than blame-passers. That doesn’t seem to be the case, and so suggests that shifting the blame has been an evolutionarily favourable trait.  That would be down to two forces:

1. Low/tolerable risk of ‘punishment’ for shifting blame and not recognising your own flaws

2. A (reproductive) advantage to shifting blame.

What might the advantage be? This is even more speculative, but it could be that potential mates are not impressed/put off by admissions of guilt. For pre-humans in a social environment, staying confident, blameless and ‘pristine’ in the eyes of onlookers (even if fraudulently) appears to have been a bigger advantage than being ‘intelligent’ to one’s own flaws. Surprising, no? Evolution favours obnoxious liars!

We could dig even deeper and suggest that this might be a ‘loophole’ in our evolution of social conventions and morals as we socialised as a species, which demand good actions and not doing evil as conditions for acceptance within the society (and, crucially, exposure to and acceptance by potential mates). These are so demanding that there are big, big incentives to ‘cheat’ and not LOOK like one’s just done evil (by shifting the blame and making excuses).

Shit, eh?

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.