The Trouble with Blame: Victims, Perpetrators and Responsibility [Paperback]

Sharon Lamb

Sharon Lamb

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Product Description

This text takes up the topic of victimization and blame as a pathology of our time and its consequences for personal responsibility. By probing the psychological dynamics of victims and perpetrators of rape, sexual abuse, and domestic violence, Sharon Lamb seeks to answer some crucial questions: How do victims become victims and sometimes perpetrators?; How can we break the psychological circle of perpetrators blaming others and victims blaming themselves?; How do victims and perpetrators view their actions and reactions?; And how does our social response to them facilitate patterns of excuse?

With clarity and compassion, Lamb examines the theories, excuses and psychotherapies that strip both victims of their power and perpetrators of their agency - and thus deprive them of the means to human dignity, healing and reparation. She shows how the practice of painting victims as innocents may actually help perpetrators of abuse to shirk responsibility for their actions; they too can claim to be victims in their own right, passive and will-less in their wrongdoing. "The Trouble With Blame" clarifies the social cost of letting perpetrators off too easily, and points out the dangers of overemphasizing victimization, two problems which eclipse our need for accountability and recovery.

Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts [Paperback]

Carol Tavris

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Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

Elliot Aronson

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Review by an Amazon customer
For clear, engaging explanations of psychological research, this is one of the best books you can get. Cognitive biases are like optical illusions, distorting our decisions, memories and judgement. This book focuses in particular on self-directed biases: the distortions of memory and explanation that make sure that each of us is the hero, not the villain, or our own life story.

When corrupt police frame innocent people, how do they justify to themselves what they are doing? When a couple divorce, how can two former lovers come to hate each other with such passion? When political or military mistakes lead to thousands of deaths, how do the decision-makers live with themselves? The authors take academic research (on cognitive dissonance, stereotypes, obedience and more) and apply it to a wide spectrum of issues from the White House to Mel Gibson's racism.

It is eye-opening to read how malleable and unreliable memory is, and how easy it is to create feedback loops of increasing certainty from just a glimmer of evidence. An appalling example is the recovered memory craze of the 80s and 90s, which is discussed at length. The book isn't entirely downbeat, even though it explains how prosecutions, marriages or therapy sessions can go terribly wrong. It shows how easy it is for good people to hurt others, but that we can avoid these traps with humility and self-questioning. They call science "a form of arrogance control".

A theme running through the work of these two psychologists is how science can address real problems of human conflict. That warm, humane spirit pervades this book and I think anybody curious about the science or the solutions would benefit from reading it.