Scapegoatism is the deeply rooted human tendency to blame a person, group, or entity for problems they did not cause, or did not solely cause, in order to relieve psychological discomfort. It shows up everywhere: in families, in workplaces, in national politics, and across social media feeds. The phenomenon is not simply about finding someone to be angry at. Research suggests that scapegoating serves at least two distinct psychological functions, reducing personal guilt and restoring a sense of control over a chaotic world, and that these two motives operate somewhat independently of each other. Understanding how scapegoatism works, where it surfaces, and why certain people or groups end up as targets reveals a pattern that has shaped human societies for thousands of years and is now being reshaped by digital technology.
Why People Scapegoat
The simplest explanation for scapegoating is that it makes people feel better, but the psychology behind that relief is more specific than “blaming others feels good.” Experimental research has identified two separate motives that drive scapegoating behavior. The first is guilt relief: when people feel personally responsible for a bad outcome, blaming someone else helps them discharge that uncomfortable feeling. The second is a desire for control: when a situation feels chaotic and causally unclear, pinning the problem on a specific agent makes the world feel more predictable and manageable, even if that attribution is wrong.
These two motives were tested in experiments using climate change as the scenario. When the issue was framed in a way that emphasized personal responsibility, participants who were given the chance to blame others showed reduced feelings of guilt. When the same issue was framed as causally uncertain, blaming a scapegoat instead helped bolster participants’ sense of general personal control over their lives.1Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. A Dual-Motive Model of Scapegoating: Displacing Blame to Reduce Guilt or Increase Control The distinction matters because it means scapegoating is not one impulse but at least two, and different situations activate different versions of it.
A related mechanism is psychological projection: attributing your own unwanted traits to someone else. In experiments where participants received feedback telling them they had high levels of repressed anger, those who were then allowed to rate an ambiguous person as angry showed the lowest subsequent awareness of their own anger. The same effect appeared with dishonesty: people told they scored high on dishonesty and who then projected that trait onto a target reported themselves as especially honest afterward.2PubMed. Evidence that projection of a feared trait can serve a defensive function Projection is not identical to scapegoating, but it feeds into it. When a community fears its own failings, the psychological groundwork is already laid for finding someone external to bear those failings.
Scapegoating as a Social Glue
One of the more provocative ideas in the study of scapegoatism comes from the literary theorist René Girard, who argued that scapegoating was not just a personal coping mechanism but a foundational social process. Girard’s hypothesis, now examined through evolutionary and anthropological lenses, holds that early human communities used the collective targeting of a victim as a way to defuse internal tensions that would otherwise tear the group apart. The emotional catharsis of uniting against a common target, he proposed, enhanced social cohesion and gave rise to religion, mythology, sacrifice, ritual, and broader cultural institutions.3Biological Theory. The Scapegoat Mechanism in Human Evolution: An Analysis of René Girard’s Hypothesis on the Process of Hominization
Whether or not Girard’s grand theory holds in every detail, the core observation has empirical support: turning collective aggression outward really does reduce conflict within a group, at least temporarily. One speculative extension of this framework even proposes that certain neuropsychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia, may have persisted in human populations partly because affected individuals were reliably chosen as scapegoats during times of internecine conflict, thereby performing a group-level function by absorbing communal hostility and restoring cohesion.4Medical Hypotheses. Mimetic Theory and the evolutionary paradox of schizophrenia: The archetypal scapegoat hypothesis That idea remains speculative and contested, but it illustrates how seriously researchers have taken the question of why scapegoating is so universal.
The broader point is harder to dismiss: every known human culture has some version of the scapegoat ritual. The term itself comes from the ancient Hebrew practice of symbolically transferring a community’s sins onto a goat and sending it into the wilderness. That such rituals arose independently across cultures suggests the impulse to externalize blame is not culturally learned from any one tradition but emerges from something basic in how human groups manage tension.
Who Gets Targeted and Why
Scapegoating is rarely random. Targets tend to share certain characteristics: they are visibly different, socially marginal, or economically vulnerable (or, paradoxically, economically successful in ways that provoke resentment). Immigrants are a classic target group, and research on this confirms the theoretical prediction. According to scapegoat theory, people tend to attribute personal or social problems to an out-group, real or imagined. This self-serving bias protects ego and social identity from responsibility while increasing prejudice toward the blamed group.5International Migration Review. Scapegoating Immigrants in Times of Personal and Collective Crises: Results from a Czech Panel Study
Economic modeling has explored a different kind of target: wealthy ethnic minorities. In societies where a local political elite feels its grip on power threatened, economically successful minority groups can be deliberately sacrificed to popular resentment. The mechanism is instrumental rather than purely emotional. When the threat of popular violence is high, governments may strategically change economic policies to redirect anger toward the minority, using them as a release valve. The model also suggests that social integration, through mixed marriages, shared schools, and overlapping social networks, reduces this kind of strategic scapegoating by making it harder to treat the minority as a separable out-group.6Economica. Violence against Rich Ethnic Minorities: A Theory of Instrumental Scapegoating
This instrumental dimension is worth lingering on because it complicates the common assumption that scapegoating is always irrational mob behavior. Sometimes it is calculated, employed by leaders who benefit from redirecting public frustration. The emotional and the strategic versions often blend: a leader identifies a group that already faces some prejudice, then amplifies and legitimizes that prejudice during a crisis.
Economic Crises and the Permission to Blame
Economic downturns reliably increase scapegoating, but the mechanism is subtler than “hard times make people bigoted.” Experimental work suggests that crises don’t just shift people’s attitudes toward minorities. They also provide people who already hold prejudiced views with a socially acceptable cover story for expressing those views. In other words, a recession gives an intolerant person a plausible economic rationale for hostility they would otherwise suppress, because the social cost of expressing xenophobia drops when everyone is worried about jobs and money.7AEA Papers and Proceedings. Scapegoating during Crises
The researchers found that when participants were told about an economic crisis, they were more likely to attribute antiminority behavior to economic concerns rather than to innate prejudice. That shift in interpretation is the key: the crisis doesn’t so much create new bigotry as lower the reputational penalty for bigotry that already exists. People around the scapegoater give them the benefit of the doubt, because “they’re worried about the economy” sounds like a reasonable explanation. That social permission effect helps explain why waves of antiminority violence so reliably accompany recessions, financial panics, and austerity periods across very different countries and centuries.
Scapegoating During Epidemics
Disease outbreaks are among the most powerful triggers for scapegoatism, and the pattern is strikingly repetitive across history. During medieval plague outbreaks, Jewish communities were massacred on the theory that they had poisoned wells. During the cholera epidemics of the 19th century, immigrant neighborhoods were blamed and quarantined. The HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s fueled virulent scapegoating of gay men and Haitian immigrants. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian communities worldwide faced a sharp rise in harassment and violence.8PubMed Central. The Dangers of “Us Versus Them”: Epidemics Then and Now
Epidemics provoke scapegoating so reliably because they combine both psychological motives discussed earlier in a single event. An epidemic generates guilt (“Am I doing enough? Did I contribute to the spread?”) and a terrifying loss of control (“I can’t see the virus; I can’t predict who will get sick”). Add in existential fear, the basic awareness that you could die, and the psychological pressure to externalize blame becomes immense. Research on terror management has shown that reminders of death can push people toward harsher judgments of those who violate their group’s norms or simply seem different.9PubMed Central. Focus theory of normative conduct and terror-management theory: the interactive impact of mortality salience and norm salience on social judgment Pandemics are, by definition, sustained reminders of death.
Political Scapegoating as Strategy
When government officials scapegoat, they typically do so as a form of blame avoidance: shifting attention from their own performance failures to an external enemy. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a vivid case study. During 2020, the Trump administration adopted the term “Chinese virus” as a deliberate rhetorical strategy, simultaneously scapegoating an ethnic group and framing the pandemic as a foreign import rather than a domestic management failure.10PubMed Central. When blame avoidance backfires: Responses to performance framing and outgroup scapegoating during the COVID-19 pandemic
The research on this particular case is instructive because it also examines when scapegoating backfires. Not all audiences accept the blame shift. Partisan alignment matters enormously: supporters of the official doing the scapegoating tend to accept the frame, while opponents view it as transparent deflection, which can actually increase the blame directed back at the official. Political scapegoating, in other words, is a bet. It works when your base is large enough or loyal enough that the redirected blame sticks, but it can amplify backlash among those who see through it.
This dynamic is not new to the digital age, but it operates faster and more visibly now. A politician’s scapegoating rhetoric can be amplified by supporters and simultaneously fact-checked and criticized by opponents within hours. The result is a polarization effect: scapegoating narratives do not spread uniformly through a population the way they might have in an era of limited information channels. Instead, they split and sort audiences, deepening existing divisions.
Scapegoating in Families
Family therapists have long observed a domestic version of scapegoatism, where one child in a household becomes the designated carrier of the family’s dysfunction. This is not metaphorical: the child who acts out, who develops behavioral problems, who is “the difficult one,” often fills a structural role in the family system. By focusing their conflict and frustration on this child, parents and siblings avoid confronting deeper relational problems between themselves.
Research has tested this clinical observation empirically. Children exhibiting externalizing behavior (aggression, defiance, rule-breaking) reported greater subjection to parental blame than other children in similar family environments.11Child & Family Social Work. Blame and family conflict: symptomatic children as scapegoats The causal direction is tangled here, and that is part of the point: a child’s difficult behavior may invite blame, but the family’s pattern of blame may also worsen the behavior, creating a feedback loop that entrenches the scapegoat role. Breaking the cycle often requires the whole family system to change, not just the identified “problem child,” which is why family therapy approaches tend to focus on the system rather than the individual.
The family scapegoat role can have lasting effects into adulthood. People who grew up as the family scapegoat often report chronic self-doubt, difficulty trusting their own perceptions, and a pattern of attracting blame in their adult relationships and workplaces. Clinicians working with these individuals sometimes describe the scapegoat identity as deeply internalized: even after leaving the family, the person continues to unconsciously position themselves in groups in ways that make them a target.
Scapegoating at Work
Organizational misconduct, whether financial fraud, safety failures, or ethical violations, almost always triggers a blame game, and that game follows predictable patterns. When an organization faces accusations of wrongdoing, leaders and members engage in sequences of discursive strategies designed to shift responsibility. Researchers have modeled this as a “blame game theory” involving four distinct pathways that depend on two types of ambiguity: whether the behavior was clearly wrong (moral ambiguity) and whether responsibility can be clearly assigned (attributional ambiguity).12Organization Theory. Blame Game Theory: Scapegoating, Whistleblowing and Discursive Struggles following Accusations of Organizational Misconduct
When both types of ambiguity are high, the conditions are ripe for scapegoating. A mid-level manager, a departed executive, a whistleblower who flagged the problem but can now be reframed as a disgruntled employee: these individuals become convenient targets because the organization can tell a plausible story in which the problem was a single person’s failure rather than a systemic issue. The whistleblower variant is particularly grim because the person who tried to stop the misconduct can end up recast as its cause. This happens most easily when the audience (regulators, media, the public) lacks the information to assess whether the individual or the system bears the real responsibility.
If you’ve ever watched a corporation’s response to scandal unfold in real time, you’ve likely seen this pattern. The initial denial is followed by the identification of a specific individual who “acted alone” or “violated company policy.” The company appears to clean house, and the underlying conditions that enabled the misconduct quietly survive. The scapegoat serves a dual function: satisfying the public’s demand for accountability while shielding the organization from deeper scrutiny.
How Social Media Supercharges Scapegoating
Digital platforms have not invented scapegoating, but they have changed its speed, scale, and mechanics in ways that deserve separate attention. Social media platforms function as what researchers have described as significant facilitators and instruments of panic production, offering new opportunities for vilifying outsiders, distorting communications, and mobilizing embittered individuals.13PubMed Central. Social media and moral panics: Assessing the effects of technological change on societal reaction
The reinforcement dynamics are especially important. Research analyzing over 12 million tweets from thousands of users found that social feedback specific to moral outrage, likes, shares, and replies on angry posts, significantly predicts future outrage expressions. People learn to express more outrage because their networks reward it. The study also found that outrage expression is shaped by what other people in your network are doing: if your social circle regularly expresses outrage, you conform to that norm even beyond your personal inclination. In more ideologically extreme networks, where outrage is already common, users were actually less sensitive to individual feedback, because the baseline norm was already so high.14PubMed Central. How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks
On platforms like YouTube, scapegoating can become formalized through content genres. “Response videos,” where a creator analyzes and criticizes a target individual’s content, can function as blueprints for harassment: they demonstrate why the target is wrong and implicitly justify audience pile-ons. Networked audiences then act on that blueprint through the platform’s social features, comments, direct messages, coordinated reporting, and cross-platform spread of the target’s personal information.15American Behavioral Scientist. “We Dissect Stupidity and Respond to It”: Response Videos and Networked Harassment on YouTube
The digital version of scapegoating differs from its older forms in one critical respect: speed of target selection. A community that once might have simmered for weeks before identifying a scapegoat can now converge on a target in hours. Someone says something clumsy on social media, a high-follower account amplifies it with commentary, and by evening the person is receiving death threats from strangers who had never heard of them that morning. The psychological dynamics are identical to older forms of scapegoating, guilt relief, control restoration, social bonding through shared outrage, but the cycle that once unfolded over months in a village or a workplace now completes itself before dinner.
When Scapegoating Fails or Reverses
For all its psychological effectiveness, scapegoating carries real risks for the scapegoater, and these are worth understanding because they suggest the conditions under which the impulse can be resisted. Political scapegoating, as noted in the pandemic research, can backfire when audiences are divided: the attempt to redirect blame ends up shining a spotlight on the very performance failures the leader was trying to obscure.16PubMed Central. When blame avoidance backfires: Responses to performance framing and outgroup scapegoating during the COVID-19 pandemic This is one reason why scapegoating works best in homogeneous information environments, where audiences share the same priors and media diet, and works worst in pluralistic ones.
At the group level, the social cohesion that scapegoating provides is brittle. It depends on the continued presence of the target: remove the scapegoat, and the underlying tensions that prompted the scapegoating resurface, often quickly. Anyone who has watched a workplace fire its designated problem employee, only to see the same dysfunction re-emerge with a new target within months, has seen this dynamic firsthand. The organizational blame game research captures this implicitly: when the ambiguity about who was really at fault remains unresolved, the blame simply migrates.
At the individual psychological level, the guilt relief that scapegoating provides is also temporary. The projection experiments demonstrated that pushing an unwanted trait onto someone else does reduce self-awareness of that trait in the short term, but the experiments were not measuring what happens over weeks and months. Clinical observation suggests that the relief is shallow: the underlying insecurity or guilt reasserts itself, requiring repeated scapegoating to keep at bay. This is part of why scapegoating can become chronic and compulsive, both for individuals and for political movements. The catharsis never fully resolves the real source of distress.
Social Integration as a Counter-Force
If scapegoating depends on the ability to treat a target as fundamentally separate from the in-group, then anything that blurs group boundaries should, in theory, reduce it. The economic modeling of violence against wealthy minorities suggests exactly this: when the researchers introduced social integration, represented by mixed marriages and shared educational institutions, the predicted level of violence dropped and the economic policies used by elites to redirect resentment changed qualitatively.17Economica. Violence against Rich Ethnic Minorities: A Theory of Instrumental Scapegoating Integration does not eliminate prejudice, but it makes instrumental scapegoating harder to pull off because the target group is no longer easily separable from the majority.
The terror management research offers a complementary finding. When death reminders pushed people toward harsher judgments of norm violators, priming participants with values of benevolence counteracted the effect.18PubMed Central. Focus theory of normative conduct and terror-management theory: the interactive impact of mortality salience and norm salience on social judgment The implication is that scapegoating under existential threat is not inevitable. It depends on which norms are salient at the moment fear strikes. A culture that foregrounds compassion when crises hit may produce less scapegoating than one that foregrounds security and in-group loyalty, even if the underlying fear is the same.
Similarly, the digital outrage research points to the role of network norms. If the people around you on social media are not rewarding outrage and blame, you produce less of it yourself. That suggests that the architecture of online environments, what gets amplified, what gets rewarded, what norms are visible, matters for whether digital spaces become engines of scapegoating or not. None of these counter-forces is a silver bullet, but together they sketch the conditions under which the oldest human impulse to externalize blame can be, if not eliminated, at least weakened enough to prevent its worst consequences.