Case File 246 · Investigation Psychology

Why Do People Shift Blame When Questioned?

By Murder Book Editorial TeamPublished by Gungrounds, the studio making Murder BookPublished 3 October 2026Updated 3 October 2026

People shift blame when questioned because moving responsibility onto someone or something else is a fast, self-protective response that eases guilt and defends a person's self-image. Psychology has documented the habit thoroughly: a self-serving bias leads people to credit themselves for good outcomes and blame circumstances for bad ones; a correspondence bias leads us to pin others' behaviour on their character while excusing our own as a product of the situation; and reducing cognitive dissonance makes "it was their fault" feel truer than "I was wrong." These tendencies appear in ordinary life, not just under suspicion. Because both innocent and guilty people deflect responsibility, blame-shifting is not reliable evidence of guilt, and it is not proof that someone is lying.

Key takeaways

Blame-shifting moves responsibility onto other people or circumstances, protecting self-image and reducing guilt.
A self-serving attributional bias is widespread: people take credit for successes and externalise failures.
The correspondence bias leads people to judge others by character but themselves by situation.
Blame-shifting is common in everyday life among the innocent and the guilty alike, so it is a weak sign of either.
It signals where to probe and corroborate, never a conclusion about guilt or honesty.

What is blame-shifting?

Blame-shifting is attributing responsibility for an act or its consequences to a cause outside oneself: another person, bad luck, the system, provocation, or circumstances. It overlaps with, but is not the same as, deflection, which redirects a conversation away from an uncomfortable topic. Blame-shifting is more specific: it keeps the topic but relocates the fault. It also differs from justifying an action, where a person accepts they did something and argues it was acceptable. In blame-shifting, the person pushes the responsibility itself elsewhere.

Why is blame-shifting so common?

Several robust findings in psychology converge on the same conclusion: externalising blame is a default, not an anomaly.

The self-serving attributional bias. People tend to attribute their successes to internal, stable causes ("I'm capable") and their failures to external ones ("the task was unfair"). A 2004 meta-analysis by Amy Mezulis and colleagues in Psychological Bulletin, drawing on 266 studies, found this bias to be large and present across most groups studied, though it varied with age, culture and psychological state. When something goes wrong, reaching for an external cause is the statistically normal move.

The correspondence bias. Daniel Gilbert and Patrick Malone's 1995 review in Psychological Bulletin describes the well-established tendency to explain other people's behaviour by their character while explaining our own by our situation. Under questioning, that asymmetry naturally produces blame-shifting: my lateness was traffic; yours was carelessness.

Reducing dissonance and protecting the self. Accepting blame clashes with most people's image of themselves as competent and decent. Relocating fault removes that clash. Albert Bandura's work on moral disengagement, set out in a 1999 review, identifies "attribution of blame" and "displacement of responsibility" as specific mechanisms by which people reassign fault to victims, circumstances or authority figures, so that their own conduct no longer troubles them.

It is a social account, too. As Scott and Lyman noted in their 1968 analysis of "accounts," offering an excuse that limits one's responsibility is a socially recognised way to repair a challenged reputation. Blame-shifting is partly a performance for an audience, learned and expected.

Put together, these mean that a person who shifts blame when questioned is behaving the way most people behave when accused of anything, from a workplace error to a car park scrape.

Does shifting blame mean someone is guilty or lying?

No. The habit is too widespread, and too weakly connected to actual wrongdoing, to work as a sign of either. The deception research is blunt on the general point: behavioural cues to lying are weak, and observers average about 54% accuracy when they try to detect lies, so no single conversational pattern reliably exposes a liar. There is no single reliable sign of deception, and blame-shifting does not become one just because it feels suspicious.

There is also a real risk running the other way, inside the investigation itself. The same biases that make a suspect externalise fault can make an investigator over-attribute fault to a suspect, seeing character where situation is the better explanation. That is one of the roots of investigative tunnel vision: once someone looks guilty, their every deflection can be read as confirmation. Treating blame-shifting as proof feeds exactly that trap.

And sometimes the blame is correctly placed. A person may point to someone else because that someone else really was responsible. The content of the claim, whether it checks out, matters far more than the fact that blame was redirected.

Is blame-shifting different under stress?

It can become more pronounced. Being questioned about a serious matter is threatening, and threat sharpens the motive to protect the self. The self-serving bias Mezulis and colleagues documented is strongest exactly where the stakes for one's self-image are highest, which is why an accusation can produce more externalising than a casual conversation about the same facts. That does not make the blame more or less accurate; it simply means the pressure of the interview is part of what is producing the behaviour. An interviewer who reads heightened deflection as heightened guilt is misattributing the effect of the situation to the character of the person, the very correspondence bias described above. The safer interpretation is that stress amplifies a normal habit, and the amplification says nothing about what happened.

What should an investigator do when someone shifts blame?

Follow the claim, not the gesture.

Identify precisely who or what is being blamed, and treat that as a testable assertion.
Seek independent corroboration for both the original act and the alleged external cause.
Watch for your own correspondence bias: ask whether a situational explanation fits the facts before settling on a character-based one.
Keep competing explanations open rather than closing on the first that confirms a suspicion.
Remember that whether blame is shifted or accepted, the fact of the matter is settled by evidence, not by the person's attributional style.

How does this show up in Murder Book?

Murder Book: The Art of Interrogation is an upcoming narrative interrogation game from Gungrounds, an independent studio in Zagreb, Croatia, inspired by real police footage and psychological interviews. Its cases are built on unreliable stories and contradictions, so a suspect who keeps relocating fault onto others is giving the player threads to pull rather than an answer.

Development screenshots show an evidence board that links statements to each other and to the wider case. The research here suggests the right instinct when a character shifts blame: log who they are blaming, then test it against the board, because the claim is a lead to verify, not a confession. Cases are designed for focused 5–10-minute sessions, which keeps the emphasis on reading accounts and weighing evidence rather than pressuring a suspect into agreement.

Murder Book is in development for PC (Steam) and mobile, with release currently planned for the end of Q2 2027.