Blame

We usually have some construction professional come speak to us in our weekly Construction Management seminar, but this past week we had Dr. David Cherrington speak to us. His is a professor of Organizational Behavior here at BYU.  I took his online class last year, so it was weird to see him in person.  When I first saw him I thought he was someone famous because I knew I had seen him on TV or something. I had actually only seen him on the online videos.  He spoke about the science of personality and he said some pretty interesting things.  One of the things he mentioned is that the outcome of any action we take is determined by two things: our personality and our environment.  We tend to overemphasize the influence of one over the over depending on the situation we're in.  For example, if we do something good (win a game, do well on a test, or something like that) we have the tendency to think that we did well because of us, not our environment.  However, if we did something bad (lose a game, fail a test, get in an accident) we tend to think it was because of things out of our control. If a mistake is made by en employee, the employee usually blames the environment, but the employer usually blames the employee. It's like we have this natural defensive wall built into us to protect us from blame.  I wonder if we're born with that or that is a condition that is taught to us by society. Maybe it's just an effect of the Fall.  Anyway, that's just something to think about.