Pointing the finger

I've read about and listened to a lot of stories recently that surround a theme--blame. The death of John Travolta's son has inspired a flurry of headlines like "Jett's death--who's to blame?" (in the metro this morning). Another news headline today reveals problems with the brakes of a fire truck that crashed into a building on Huntington Ave (guess where that story is headed?). I just listened to an episode of This American Life about how one person/family can ruin the day/health/life of others--the example they used was the outbreak of measles in a California community after several parents decided not to vaccinate their children.

One of the stories in the This American Life episode dealt with an experiment done by a psychologist who wanted to study the 'bad apple' phenomenon in group behavior. He hired an actor to play different types of 'bad apples' like The Slacker, The Jerk, and The Pessimistic Depressive. This actor was one of four people assigned to different groups where the group had to work together on a project to accomplish some task. In each scenario, the actor's bad attitude immediately raised the hackles of the other group members, who not only responded to him with bad behavior but treated each other more poorly than the groups without the actor. That is, each scenario except one. There was one group that still performed the task superbly, and the psychologist thought it was due to the presence of this one group member. Apparently this one guy was the son of a diplomat, and was really good at listening and asking questions of everyone else in the group. This guy was able to save the group from the plight of the bad apple.

Sometimes it's totally valid to pin the blame on someone or something. But we live in such a litigious society that every single time something goes awry, we perniciously seek out who fucked up and allowed it to happen. It's kind of a messed up way of thinking, and it leads to really negative thought patterns. We don't have the kind of control in our lives that we wish (or like to think we do have already). And what makes more sense, try to unsuccessfully change our external world to accommodate our needs, or learn to not fight it so hard and relinquish some control? Or even allow yourself to listen to someone when he's driving you crazy?