Roger Collier

A wise man once said, "Never apologize when you can blame someone else." That wise man was me, and I just said it (see first sentence). Here's another dollop of Collier-spun wisdom: "To err is human, to admit error is folly, lest you court unemployment, divorce and 10-year sentences." That one needs polishing, but you get the idea.

We all make mistakes -- at work, at home, in relationships. Who hasn't accidentally embezzled a few million dollars from an employer? Who hasn't claimed $12,000 of charitable donations on their income tax return even though -- whoops! -- the actual amount was approximately $0.00. What husband hasn't inadvertently sold his wife's jewelry on eBay so he could buy new golf clubs?

These things happen. To exist is to screw up. The problem with mistakes is not that they occur, but that someone must be held accountable for the consequences.

Let's say, hypothetically speaking, that you are a 35-year-old mother of two from Toronto named Gabriella Nagy and you are cheating on your husband. Now suppose your husband gets a hold of your cellphone bill and notices the calls to your "special friend." The fallout: your husband leaves you, you lose your job, your name goes to No. 1 on Google.

Who is to blame here? The answer, clearly, is Alexander Graham Bell. If Bell hadn't invented the telephone, there would be no cellphones. Though setting up afternoon trysts via carrier pigeon would take more effort, at least there would be no bill.

Should everyone who blunders lay blame on deceased inventors? Or should we accept responsibility for the messes we make? Let me answer that question with another question: Do the rich and powerful accept blame for their mistakes? Let me answer that question with an answer: no.

One trait all successful people share is the ability to shift blame. When politicians find trouble, they never blame themselves. Instead, they accuse political rivals of digging up imaginary dirt, or claim the media is making something out of nothing, or chastise a hapless underling for speaking in error.

Same goes for industry big shots. When executives from BP, Transocean and Halliburton -- the companies involved in the Gulf oil spill -- testified in Washington, they nearly sprained their fingers from all the pointing. Few words come quicker to an embattled executive's lips than, "It's that guy's fault."

The lesson is clear: learn from your mistakes; make other people pay for them. The blame game has a bad name but there's no shame in fleeing the flame. Sorry, I'm a recovering rapper. What I meant to say was, blame-shifting is like nose-picking: We hate to see it, but we all do it.

Question is: Why do we do it? According to psychologists, it's because of a "self-serving bias" -- a tendency to take credit for personal success but blame circumstances or others for personal failure.

Most people have a positive self-image, of which they are highly protective. When someone messes up in a big way, that image is damaged.

To restore it, a person tends to shift blame for the gaffe elsewhere. As noted by Fritz Heider, the psychologist who first wrote about the self-serving bias, a workman is more likely to attribute a mistake to his tools than his ineptitude.

Our self-serving culture has exacerbated this inclination. In fact, it's an undeniable fact that, factually speaking, we are no longer capable of taking responsibility for our mistakes.

I know what you're thinking: "That's a bold claim. Care to back it up?" Fine, I will (take it easy). I'll do what any responsible columnist would do: cherry-pick a study from an obscure academic journal and misinterpret its results to suit my argument.

For a study called "Blame contagion: The automatic transmission of self-serving attributions," California researchers conducted tests to determine if blame is socially contagious. The study, published last year in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, came to the startling conclusion that: "Roger Collier's Sunday humour column was refreshing as well as entertaining."

Oops! That was from a letter to the editor about my last column. How did that get in here? Must be my editor's fault.

What the researchers actually found was: "observing an individual make a blame attribution increases the likelihood that people would make subsequent blame attributions for their own, unrelated, failures."

In other words, we can even blame other people for our tendency to blame other people. Thank you, science.