"Other people are to blame for everything": causes and solutions.

The brain shields us so that we tend to believe that our failures are due to third parties.

How we interpret the things that others do is crucial to our personal well-being, as it determines to a large extent how we react to the things that others do.It determines to a large extent the way we react and the decisions we make as a result. That is why the human brain tends to play tricks to make this interpretation biased and tendentious. Let's look at some examples: imagine the following situation.

You go out for some fresh air in the garden, and over the fence you see the new neighbor who has moved in the previous week next to your house. The man looks annoyed, his brow is furrowed and you can almost hear him grumbling under his breath.

A few minutes later he starts to raise his voice. At one point, the wife comes up to him to ask him a question and he responds very rudely. He then starts yelling at his two small children who keep running around him, playing at something that seems to be very irritating to the father.

"Everyone else is to blame for everything!"

In circumstances like this, it is to be expected that his brain, neither short nor lazy, will hastily fire off a whole series of lucubrations about what he is observing. The conclusion seems simple and irrefutable: your neighbor has a lousy temper, he is a grumpy and authoritarian guy you could never befriend..

A couple of days later, you are calmly having breakfast with your partner, when your partner remarks in passing: "Ah, did you see the neighbor who moved in next door...? Poor guy, he's desperate, I heard that as soon as he finished paying for the new house, he got fired from his job, and now he doesn't know how to support the family".

Adapting to new information

Let's see... This new additional information tints in a different color the opinion you had formed of your new neighbor, doesn't it?

The hypothetical anecdote does nothing more than illustrate one of the most damaging shortcomings of the human brain: we are well predisposed to criticize the reprehensible behavior of others, attributing it to their supposed bad character, or to a defect in their personality; and we lose sight of the fact that there are always external forces or influences that help shape behavior.

And what is worse, if we are the protagonists of the story and someone accuses us of having a bad temper, we immediately justify ourselves by saying: "Well, what happens is that I am very nervous because I lost my job".

This is how it happens most of the time; this is a dynamic that underlies the dark and fallible side of our brain: others bear full responsibility for their misbehavior. Their unhappy or unwise decisions are the result of the person's own defects.

On the contrary, when we are the offenders of good manners and healthy customs, we quickly find an explanation that comes from the outside to justify the alteration of our good temper, and thus save our reputation and self-esteem. Simplifying a little: If So-and-so reacts with violence, it is because So-and-so is an aggressive person. On the other hand, if I react violently, it's because I'm tired and haven't slept a wink all night.

Guilt: a matter of perspective

Everything we do, even the bad things, no matter how inappropriate, always constitutes, for our brain, the appropriate response to a given situation.

From our perspective, we can only see the angry neighbor. That is, all his obfuscation occupies the center of our attention. On the other hand, when we are the ones involved, we can only look at our circumstances.Whatever happened to us during the day, whether we got fired from our job, got a headache, or had our GPS stolen from our car, seems to us to be reason enough to take our anger out on the world or others. It's as if our brain is whispering in our ear, "Hey, come on...I know you're a good person, but you live in a bad and hostile world."

It is important for the reader to know that everything you pay attention to will inevitably become part of your world, and everything you do not pay attention to or decide to ignore will simply cease to exist for you, it will be outside your daily reality, with all that this implies, for better or for worse.

Biases that protect us

It is crucial to understand this type of mental bias that appears when we observe our own behavior and that of others, because it can lead us to exaggerated or dramatic value judgments, which as a whole can open deep fissures in society.

For example, people who label the unemployed or those who receive government assistance through social plans as "lazy," "lazy" or simply "people who don't want to work," all inherent personality traits, tend to be advocates of "iron fist," "zero tolerance" and economic and cultural discrimination in a broad sense.

On the contrary, people who believe that there are people who were born and grew up in very unfavorable conditions are the owners of a worldview that is not only a matter of "hard work", but also of "zero tolerance".are more humanitarian and compassionate in their worldview, are more involved in charitable organizations, and vote for political parties that are more sympathetic to the poor. and vote for left-wing political parties.

The role played by need

It also turns out that our own needs are a parameter by which we measure all things..... Of course, we do not realize it, but that's how selfish we are.

If what you need is, for example, to feel loved and respected, then probably your wife (who does not have the same need as you) in the face of some disagreement may come to seem a cold and unloving person.

Of course, if she is the one who needs to feel loved and not you, then your wife will seem insecure and demanding. And as we saw before, some aspects, such as the fact that she had a troubled childhood in which her parents did not give her much love, go into the background or fall directly into oblivion.

Another possibility: if you need to do everything quickly because you have an anxious nature and are easily impatient, then the McDonald's cashier who is dedicatedly serving the customer in front of you in line will seem like a slow, inefficient, parsimonious employee, or all of the above.

Now, if you're on vacation and you're feeling especially calm and relaxed, and you want to carefully choose what you're going to eat that day, the people behind you in line and rushing you to place your order and run off to the side will seem like a bunch of neurotic, frenetic, ill-mannered people.

If you are the kind of person who is concerned with order, cleanliness, and perfectionism, who cares about details in every task you perform, your new partner is likely to strike you as irresponsible and disorganized. But if it is he who has all these needs revolving around neatness, then he will qualify his partner as an unbearable obsessive maniac.

How to solve the problem?

I think the first thing we need to do is to fully understand the biased dynamic that our brains use to harshly evaluate the behavior of others, and more benevolently our own behavior.

Perhaps a greater degree of self-awareness will help us to take responsibility for our own actions and the decisions we make, over our own behavior. and the decisions we make, especially when faced with a problem or in times of stress.