Self-Blame, Self-Talk, Self-Flagellation
from Part I - The Nature of Self-Blame
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2022
When Tom Brady throws an interception, he yells at himself and pounds his fists on his helmet. When Serena Williams misses a shot, she breaks her racket. When Tiger Woods misses a long putt, he falls to his knees and shakes his head. These athletes are clearly blaming themselves. Surprisingly, though, current theories of blame have a very hard time accounting for such cases. Most theories of blame take other-blame – directly expressed dyadic blame – as their paradigm, typically thought to be a response to poor quality of will or moral wrongdoing and consisting of some kind of relationship modification, communication, or protest. None of these features seems to apply in the cases of athletic self-blame. Recently, some theorists have taken self-blame to be a more fundamental paradigm than other-blame, but they are focused on self-blame as guilt, which again can’t capture the athletic cases, because Tom, Serena, and Tiger aren’t feeling anything like guilt when they blame themselves. As a result of these problems, I offer a new theory of self-blame, one that starts by theorizing directly about the athletic cases. I draw from some fascinating recent psychological work on the phenomenon of self-talk to make the case that the emotional core of self-blame is in fact very different than that of other-blame, as is evidenced in a new puzzle I introduce about hypocrisy and its limits.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.