Blame: Goat Hunting

Your phone dies a week out of warranty. (It knew.) It rains on your wedding day. (God is angry.) You didn't get a promotion. (Sabotage!) Is the world out to get you?

We're biased to see intent in negative events, according to new research by Carey Morewedge of Carnegie Mellon University. In one study using a computerized spin-the-wheel game in which outcomes were decided sometimes by chance and sometimes by an unseen (and unreal) other player, participants were more likely to blame losses than wins on the other player.

What causes our scapegoating bias? Happenstance is hard to fathom, so we search for intentional causes behind everything. And for good events, we like to take credit ourselves. But for failures, we look for someone else, even if it means inventing an adversary. The bias appears in superstition (baseball curses), misanthropy (blaming minorities for social ills), and mental illness (paranoid personality disorder). "One of the problems with the tendency is that suspicions of other people may poison our interactions," Morewedge says.

Morewedge became interested in the topic when the Red Sox broke the Curse of the Bambino in 2003. "When they finally won the World Series, they didn't attribute it to the ghost of Ted Williams," he quips. It was all skill.

Passing the Buck: Historical Sacrificial Lambs

• Haitians: Pat Robertson blamed their recent earthquake on a 1791 pact with the devil to escape slavery under the French.
• Fans: Cubs fan Steve Bartman tried to catch a foul ball, interfering with a Cubs fielder and receiving blame for a big 2003 playoff loss.
• Neocons: Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, said God caused Hurricane Katrina partly to punish America for the Iraq War.
• Foreigners: The radio host Michael Savage suggested Al Qaeda created swine flu and used Mexicans as "mules" to infect us.