I've got to remember to share this with my social psychology class next semester. If I remember the assignment correctly, at the beginning of the semester, we had to come up with 3 big questions that we wanted answered by the end of the semester, and we researched and wrote small papers to answer each. This is the start of my second question. I'm so proud to look back and see the budding social psychologist!!

Question: Why are people so quick to blame someone else or put the blame on an "uncontrollable" facet of the situation when something goes wrong?

Why are people always prepared to find fault in another person or extenuating circumstances when things go wrong; yet when something goes right, the same person will fully credit to his own ability? In high school I played on the varsity girl's tennis team. I started my senior year at first doubles with one of my best friends, Jenny, as my partner. Jenny and I had played together frequently and made a good team. In particular, in the Gloucester County Times Tennis Tournament, we were playing amazingly well and made it to the semi-finals. We were extremely excited because our school had not made it that far in the tournament in over 10 years. Unfortunately, our semi-final match was against Gateway, the school with the best tennis players in the conference. Going into the match, Jenny and I knew we had no hope of winning. However, we knew that losing the match would not eliminate us from the tournament because the final matches would determine first, second, third, and fourth places. Therefore, we played the semi-final match less than our best with the idea in mind that we would win the final match and take third place. Going into the final match, Jenny and I were overly self-confident and already imaging taking home the trophy for third place (there was no trophy for fourth). Early in the match, I dove for a ball that was well beyond my reach, tumbled to the ground, and landed pretty hard on my wrist. Being the tough player that I am, I got up, determined to finish the match. Jenny and I finished the match by playing some of the worst and sloppiest tennis we had ever played; needless to say, we lost the match. When asked by other teammates and friends why we did not win, Jenny and I would reply, the other team was very good; I had hurt my wrist; the courts were in bad shape--any excuse that hid the real reason: that we were overconfident and made stupid mistakes. Had we won that match, we would have been proclaiming that we were good tennis players; the other team was good but we were better. This phenomenon of blaming everyone else to protect one's own self-image (as Jenny and I did with the tennis match), or taking full credit to bolster one's self-image can generally be explained by the theory of the fundamental attribution error and the self-serving bias.