Blame is the act of censuring, holding responsible, or making negative statements about an individual or group that their actions or inaction are socially or morally irresponsible, the opposite of praise. When someone is morally responsible for doing something wrong, their action is blameworthy. By contrast, when someone is morally responsible for doing something right, it may be said that their action is praiseworthy. There are other senses of praise and blame that are not ethically relevant. One may praise someone's good dress sense, and blame their own sense of style for their own dress sense.
Neurology
Blaming appears to relate to include brain activity in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ). The amygdala has been found to contribute when we blame others, but not when we respond to their positive actions.
Sociology and psychology
Humans—consciously and unconsciously—constantly make judgments about other people. The psychological criteria for judging others may be partly ingrained, negative, and rigid, indicating some degree of grandiosity.
Blaming provides a way of devaluing others, with the end result that the blamer feels superior, seeing others as less worthwhile and/or making the blamer "perfect". Off-loading blame means putting the other person down by emphasizing their flaws.
Victims of manipulation and abuse frequently feel responsible for causing negative feelings in the manipulator/abuser towards them and the resultant anxiety in themselves. This self-blame often becomes a major feature of victim status.
The victim gets trapped into a self-image of victimization. The psychological profile of victimization includes a pervasive sense of helplessness, passivity, loss of control, pessimism, negative thinking, strong feelings of guilt, shame, remorse, self-blame, and depression. This way of thinking can lead to hopelessness and despair.
Self-blame
Two main types of self-blame exist:
behavioral self-blame – undeserved blame based on actions. Victims who experience behavioral self-blame feel that they should have done something differently, and therefore feel at fault. characterological self-blame – undeserved blame based on character. Victims who experience characterological self-blame feel there is something inherently wrong with them which has caused them to deserve to be victimized.
Behavioral self-blame is associated with feelings of guilt within the victim. While the belief that one had control during the abuse (past control) is associated with greater psychological distress, the belief that one has more control during the recovery process (present control) is associated with less distress, less withdrawal, and more cognitive reprocessing.
Counseling responses found helpful in reducing self-blame include:
supportive responses
psychoeducational responses (for example, learning about rape trauma syndrome) responses addressing the issue of blame.
A helpful type of therapy for self-blame is cognitive restructuring or cognitive–behavioral therapy. Cognitive reprocessing is the process of taking the facts and forming a logical conclusion from them that is less influenced by shame or guilt.
Victim blaming
Victim blaming is holding the victims of a crime, an accident, or any type of abusive maltreatment to be entirely or partially responsible for the incident that has occurred. The fundamental attribution error concept explains how people tend to blame negative behavior more on the victims traits than the situation at the time of the event.
Individual blame versus system blame
In sociology, individual blame is the tendency of a group or society to hold the individual responsible for their situation, whereas system blame is the tendency to focus on social factors that contribute to one's fate.
Blame shifting
Blaming others can lead to a "kick the dog" effect where individuals in a hierarchy blame their immediate subordinate, and this propagates down a hierarchy until the lowest rung (the "dog"). A 2009 experimental study has shown that blaming can be contagious even for uninvolved onlookers.
In complex international organizations, such as enforcers of national and supranational policies and regulations, the blame is usually attributed to the last echelon, the implementing actors.