Blame for a decision lands on the most visible person associated with it rather than on whoever made it.
TV Tropes uses the name for audiences blaming an actor for a script, a director for a studio's cuts, or a translator for the original's faults. The same pattern runs through organisations, where a spokesperson or front-line employee absorbs anger at decisions made elsewhere.
In practice
- Customers berate a call-centre worker for a pricing policy set by a board they will never see.
- A newsreader receives the complaints about a story chosen by an editor.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is visibility: people attribute outcomes to the agent they can see. Another is the fundamental attribution error, which assigns outcomes to persons rather than systems. A third is design: institutions route blame towards front-line staff, as research on blame avoidance describes.
- In its favour
- Consistent with research on the fundamental attribution error and with the documented strategies of blame avoidance in government.
- Against it
- A folk observation, and the visible person is sometimes the responsible one; the label can also be used to deflect deserved criticism onto an invisible system.
- Standing
- Compare the fundamental attribution error and blame avoidance.
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- The folklore of office life