Praise-many, blame-fewer: A common (and successful) strategy for attributing responsibility in groups

It is often unclear how to apportion praise after a group's success and blame after a group's failure. Should all members share responsibility or only a select few? In this article, we examine how people do solve this apportionment problem and how they should solve this problem. Seven empirical studies (N = 1,052) reveal that people frequently rely on a strategy of praise-many, blame-fewer, a tendency found across several different domains: high-profile sports championships, hierarchical business decisions, and first- and third-person judgments of impromptu work teams. Agent-based models test the success of different apportionment strategies under different conditions. These models suggest that in many circumstances it is adaptive to praise broadly after success and to blame more narrowly after failure-even with only minimal insight into individual skill-although effects vary depending on the motivation of group members to improve after being blamed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).