Hanlon’s Razor

Often, it’s easier to blame others when bad things happen rather than blame yourself. It’s easier to look for someone external to carry the can than to accept it’s actually your fault you’re in that situation to begin with. This is a self-protective conditioned response. It’s a recognised thing most of us do from time to time, and it can be protective in the short term, but it also leads us astray and can eventually limit personal growth.

The Actor-Observer Bias

The idea here has a name in psychology: the actor-observer bias — the tendency to explain our own behaviour by pointing to the situation, while explaining other people’s behaviour by pointing to their character. It was one of the most cited findings in social psychology for decades, and it’s the reason it’s worth being honest about its research history here. When researchers went back and pooled well over a hundred studies on it, the effect turned out to be far weaker and less consistent than the original work suggested — a useful reminder that even “settled” psychology sometimes isn’t. What holds up better under scrutiny is a closely related finding, correspondence bias, sometimes called the fundamental attribution error: our reliable tendency to put too much weight on someone else’s character, and too little on their circumstances, when we’re judging their behaviour. Either way, the everyday advice that follows doesn’t actually depend on the research being airtight. It’s just a useful habit of mind, and it’s the same habit of mind that Hanlon’s Razor is built on.

In simple language, it’s easier to blame a situation, circumstances, or other people than ourselves when things go wrong.

This pattern can be so ingrained in some people that they go around looking in life for external reasons for their present situation. I sometimes see patients who are convinced there must be a medical reason, a diagnosis, an illness behind why things in their life haven’t gone to plan, even when every test comes back normal. That’s a recognisable and genuinely difficult experience — health anxiety is real, and it deserves compassion rather than judgement — but for some people it’s also an example of the same underlying pattern: looking outward for an explanation that circumstances alone can’t fully carry.

When we blame external circumstances, we can also get into a habit of blaming other people when things go wrong. The trouble is that when you blame others, you tend to feel that those people are doing those things to you deliberately, and this can cause unrest and a feeling that you’re being persecuted. And this is where the next concept, Hanlon’s Razor, comes in.

Hanlon’s Razor

This is a powerful, simple tool for reducing unnecessary anger, resentment, paranoia, and emotional suffering in relationships, work, and daily life.

We use this tool to stop blaming others for things that happen to us. Hanlon’s Razor is one idea, and only one: don’t assume someone is deliberately trying to harm, sabotage, or disrespect you when their behaviour can be just as well explained by incompetence, absent-mindedness, poor communication, oversight, or simply being human and fallible. It’s a charitable rule about how you read other people’s behaviour — and the same open-mindedness is worth turning on yourself too, since recognising your own mistakes, your own oversights, your own contribution to your problems is where real change actually starts.

The Problem with Blaming Others, External Situations and Circumstances

It’s a natural response that when we look at ourselves, our situation and own actions, we’re more likely to attribute our response or present situation to external influences. It’s everyone else’s fault. It’s the economy. It’s the government. It’s your boss. It’s your parents. It’s society. It’s anything and everything except you and your choices.

Let’s bring this down to a more basic level. If you’re responding in an unhelpful way, that’s on you, not someone else. Or as Hanlon’s Razor states, ‘we should not attribute to malice that which is more easily explained by stupidity.’

Most of the time when things go wrong, it’s not because someone’s out to get you. It’s because someone, possibly you, made a mistake.

It’s easy to blame others. It’s easy to look for reasons why you’re not doing what you should be doing. Yet true intentionality is very rare. That is unless you really do have that person following you around deliberately making your life difficult. The fact is most of us don’t. We don’t need anyone else to make our lives hard. We do a great job of doing it ourselves.

There are those rare times when a co-worker does something wrong, but more often than not they don’t, yet they still get blamed for everything else that goes wrong too even when it’s not their fault. This is the actor-observer bias at work. We blame others for when things go wrong, and explain away our own faults as down to circumstances. When they mess up, it’s because they’re incompetent, not us.

How to Spot the Pattern

One of the easiest ways of spotting this pattern in your own self-talk and excuses is to look for when you use words like ‘because’, ‘as’, or ‘but’. These tend to go under the radar because these words are often followed by statements of external blame. ‘I couldn’t do it because…’ ‘I didn’t get it done as…’ ‘I would have succeeded but…’ Listen to yourself for a day. Count how many times you use these words to shift responsibility away from yourself.

Other times you may just blatantly blame others for your own misfortune, blind to the fact that it’s your own fault and what you really should be doing is looking honestly at your own tiredness, arrogance or oversights too. Taking responsibility is so much harder to do, and blaming others is so much easier. But easier doesn’t mean better. It just means you’ll stay stuck.

As a society we often blame what we see as outsiders for life’s problems. They take all the jobs. They get all the best schools. They get all the promotions. (Remember They Syndrome earlier in the Foundation Course). Or we just blame society itself for our own mishaps. So if you’ve spent the last six months avoiding the things you know you need to do, you shouldn’t really be blaming the Prime Minister and the current government for the fact that your life isn’t going anywhere.

This pattern is one of the main reasons why we instinctively blame others for our own hang-ups and misfortunes. Because when we do that, we can allow ourselves to take comfort in easy excuses. We can avoid the uncomfortable truth that we’re responsible for where we are. We can pretend that if only circumstances were different, if only other people were different, we’d be fine. We wouldn’t be. We’d just find new excuses.

Here’s the thing about this pattern: it feels good in the moment. It lets you off the hook. It means you don’t have to change anything because it’s not your fault anyway. But it keeps you stuck. Because if everything’s everyone else’s fault, then you have no power to change it. You’re just a victim of circumstance, helpless and hopeless, waiting for someone else to fix things for you. They won’t. They never do.

The Cure

The cure is brutal self-honesty, alongside using Hanlon’s Razor on the people around you. When something goes wrong, ask yourself what you did or didn’t do that contributed to it. Not what someone else did. What you did. There’s usually something. Even if someone else genuinely messed up, you still made choices that put you in that situation, or choices about how you responded to it. Own those choices.

I had a patient once who’d been passed over for promotion three times running. Each time, he was sure it was politics — the boss playing favourites, colleagues taking credit for his work, a system rigged against people like him. Some of that might even have been true some of the time. But when we talked it through properly, it turned out he’d also missed two deadlines that year, hadn’t updated his skills in a decade, and bristled visibly whenever anyone gave him feedback. None of that made him a bad person. Most of it was ordinary, fixable stuff. But he couldn’t see it, because seeing it would have meant admitting he had some power here, and that he hadn’t been using it.

When you blame external factors, you give away your power. When you take responsibility, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it means admitting you’ve been careless or wrong, you take your power back. You can’t control other people. You can’t control circumstances. But you can control your choices and your responses. That’s all you can control, and it’s the only thing you need to control.

Most people find it easier to believe in conspiracy theories than to accept they’re making bad choices. They find it easier to believe the world is against them than to accept they’re sometimes their own worst enemy.

Stop looking for external reasons why you’re stuck. Stop collecting evidence for why it’s not your fault. Stop blaming your boss, your parents, your circumstances, the government, the economy. Start looking at what you’re doing and not doing. Start taking responsibility for your choices. Start accepting that you’ve got yourself into this situation, which means you can get yourself out of it.

The next time something goes wrong, before you start pointing fingers, ask yourself what you could have done differently. Not what someone else should have done. What you could have done. Be honest with yourself. Most of the time you’ll find that while other people may have played a part, you played a bigger one. And that’s actually good news, because it means you have the power to change it.

The actor-observer bias keeps you stuck by convincing you that you’re powerless. Hanlon’s Razor sets you free, in a different direction, by showing you that most problems, in other people at least, are caused by ordinary human error rather than malice — and that ordinary human error is fixable. Malice is hard to deal with. Conspiracy is impossible to fight. But a mistake, or an oversight, or a bad habit? That you can fix. You can learn. You can improve. You can make different choices.

Stop shooting the messenger. Stop blaming others for your problems. Stop looking for external reasons why your life isn’t working. Use Hanlon’s Razor with other people, and start looking in the mirror for yourself. Start taking responsibility. Start accepting that you’re where you are because of the choices you’ve made, and you’ll go somewhere different when you start making different choices. It’s that simple. Not easy, but simple.

The uncomfortable truth is that you probably have more to do with your problems than you’d like to admit. The liberating truth is that if they’re your doing, you can also do something about fixing them. Stop hiding behind blame. Start owning your choices, owning your mistakes, and owning your power to change. That’s where transformation actually begins.

Further reading

• Ross, L. (1977) — ‘The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings’
• Gilbert, D. T. & Malone, P. S. (1995) — ‘The correspondence bias’
• Malle, B. F. (2006) — ‘The actor-observer asymmetry in attribution: A (surprising) meta-analysis’
• Tavris, C. & Aronson, E. — Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me)
• Lerner, M. J. — The Belief in a Just World