The hockey championship came down to a single goal. It had been a tough game throughout, with plenty of missed passes, poor coverage, and a defense that couldn’t keep up. But when the final whistle blew and the loss set in, the blame landed squarely on the goalie. No one mentioned the breakdowns that led to the shot or asked why the offense couldn’t hold possession; it felt easier to assign the loss to one mistake by one person. One missed save and suddenly the team had the reason they needed for why their season came to an end. 

Scapegoating is an act by a person or group of people that turns complex failures into simple stories, often at the expense of someone who didn’t cause the problem but just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It can offer a sense of control or closure, but it usually leaves the real issues unsolved and the wrong person carrying the weight.

Displacement: A psychological defense mechanism in which emotions or blame are redirected from the true source of distress onto a safer or more convenient target.

In-group/Out-group Dynamics: The tendency to favor members of one’s own group (in-group) and treat others (out-group) with suspicion or hostility. 

Collective Blame: The attribution of fault to an entire group based on the actions or perceived failures of one or a few members.

The origins of scapegoating can be traced back to ancient religious rituals. The Bible tells the tale of the Israelites, who, seeking to remove collective guilt from the group, developed a process to remove the burden of the accumulation of a year’s worth of sins. Described in Leviticus 16, a goat was symbolically burdened with the sins of the community and cast into the wilderness as a physical and spiritual act meant to purify the group through sacrifice.² This ritual gave rise to the term “scapegoat,” which would come to represent the broader human tendency to assign blame and cast away an individual or group in times of stress.

In the early 1900s, Sigmund Freud introduced the idea of displacement, where people deal with difficult emotions, like anger or fear, by redirecting them toward someone else. His work showed how blaming others as scapegoats can help people avoid facing more painful or complex feelings.³ Not long after, social scientists began formalizing psychological explanations for this behavior. 

In 1939, along with his colleagues at Yale University, American psychologist John Dollard introduced the frustration-aggression hypothesis, suggesting that when people cannot direct anger at the real source of their distress, they displace it onto more vulnerable or socially acceptable targets.⁴ This theory helped explain why marginalized groups are often blamed during times of economic or social upheaval.

René Girard, a French historian and literary theorist in the mid-to-late 1900s, argued that scapegoating is a foundational mechanism for maintaining cohesion in human groups. In his book The Scapegoat, he explained how communities resolve internal conflict by projecting violence onto a chosen victim, whose sacrifice brings temporary peace.⁵ According to Girard, scapegoating is both a myth-making process and a psychological reflex to keep the peace in groups. These are essential components of his “mimetic theory,” which suggests that human desire is framed by imitating the desires of those around us, leading to aggressive behaviors—including scapegoating.

During moments of crisis throughout history, scapegoating has emerged as a tool for deflecting blame and making sense of chaos. In medieval Europe, Jewish communities were blamed for plagues and economic collapse.⁶ During the 20th century, authoritarian regimes pointed to immigrants, minorities, or political opponents to unify fractured populations under a common enemy.⁷ In modern settings, scapegoating occurs after organizational failures and public scandals, as well as in personal relationships and families. Instead of examining systemic flaws, individuals and groups assign blame to one individual or team, preserving their collective identity by isolating the “problem.” The pattern is consistent: when groups face uncertainty, blame is bound to follow.

Sigmund Freud

An Austrian neurologist working in Vienna in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Freud introduced the concept of displacement as a way of redirecting distress onto safer targets. This helped shape early psychological theories of scapegoating.

John Dollard

A mid-20th-century American psychologist at Yale University, Dollard co-authored the frustration-aggression hypothesis in 1939. He argued that when people can’t confront the true source of frustration, they often blame someone more vulnerable.

René Girard

A French theorist who taught at Stanford University from the 1960s to the 1990s, Girard viewed scapegoating as a universal cultural pattern. He believed communities restore order by projecting blame onto a single, symbolic victim.

Scapegoating can provide short-term relief, but it often causes long-term damage. It distorts accountability and deepens divisions, reinforcing cycles of exclusion and injustice.

Individual well-being

Individuals who are consistently blamed or excluded often experience anxiety, shame, and chronic stress. Over time, this can lead to isolation and difficulty forming or maintaining healthy social connections with others. These effects are especially pronounced when the blame is persistent, comes from multiple sources, is tied to close relationships, or develops during formative experiences such as childhood or adolescence.

Recent research examined the psychological toll of family scapegoating among medical students and found strong associations between scapegoating experiences and elevated levels of depression, stress, and anxiety.⁸ Although their intervention, a seminar on the topic of mental health, significantly improved students’ mental health outcomes, it didn’t reduce perceptions of family scapegoating. This highlights how deeply-rooted and psychologically complex the experience can be, and underscores the need to address scapegoating through long-term, trauma-informed strategies that prioritize psychological safety and relational repair—not just through immediate crisis support.

Whistle(blow) while you work

When misconduct is alleged, ambiguity around what happened and who’s responsible creates space for strategic blame-shifting. Organizations often react to such ambiguity by producing “discursive strategies” that deflect blame, which may include identifying a single employee as the problem or casting whistleblowers as disloyal or opportunistic.⁹ The effect of blame games is rarely limited to impact on one person; entire systems of communication and decision-making can shift in response. Morale, transparency, and ethical standards are all vulnerable when responsibility is avoided rather than owned up to.

Modern workplace theorists Roulet and Pichler describe a “blame game theory,” with scapegoating and whistleblowing as two sides of the same strategic coin.⁹ Whistleblowers may act to preempt being scapegoated, while organizations may scapegoat to delegitimize internal critics. This ongoing cycle of blame can fracture team dynamics and leave legitimate concerns unaddressed. Rather than resolving conflict, it often embeds fear and defensiveness into the culture—particularly if the organization benefits from maintaining ambiguity. Over time, that dynamic makes it harder to hold anyone accountable and easier to punish those who try.

Political and racial divides

Scapegoating has long been used to redirect public anger during periods of uncertainty, and political leaders often lean on this strategy to deflect criticism. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the term “Chinese virus” circulated widely in U.S. political discourse. This language placed disproportionate blame on Chinese people and Asian American communities, contributing to a surge in anti-Asian sentiment, harassment, and violence. Instead of helping the public understand the complexities of a global health crisis, scapegoating reinforced harmful stereotypes and shifted attention away from institutional failures in the pandemic response.

A study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that racially charged blame narratives during the pandemic had lasting health and safety impacts on stigmatized communities. The researchers concluded that this kind of political scapegoating polarizes opinions and undermines public health goals, distorting accountability and deepening mistrust across social groups.¹⁰ When blame is racialized and repeated at scale, it becomes embedded in the public imagination, shaping how people interpret risk and responsibility, as well as identity within a group.

Scholars have noted scapegoating’s limited empirical grounding, its misalignment with observed patterns of behavior, and its failure to fully account for the role of intergroup conflict in shaping blame.

Limited empirical validation

While scapegoating theory tells a convincing story, it’s hard to test or measure in real-world settings. Early documentation of scapegoat theory, particularly the frustration-aggression model and Girard’s cultural framework, mainly relies on conceptual or anecdotal evidence rather than testable, data-driven findings. That makes it less useful for designing policies or applying it to real-life problems.

Recent efforts have aimed to address this gap. A panel study conducted in the Czech Republic examined how personal stress (such as job dissatisfaction or health concerns) and broader societal disruptions (like the COVID-19 pandemic) influenced anti-immigrant sentiment over time. The researchers found that individuals under strain were more likely to scapegoat immigrants, providing rare empirical support for the theory’s basic claims.¹¹ Still, studies like this remain the exception, and the field lacks a consistent body of comparative, cross-national research needed to refine or challenge the theory’s foundational assumptions.

Misalignment with real-world behavior

Scapegoating theory suggests that people under stress displace blame onto vulnerable out-groups, yet real-world behavior doesn't always fit that mold. In many cases, the targets of collective blame aren’t the weakest or most accessible, but those who pose symbolic or ideological threats—even when they hold significant social or political power. For example, large-scale protests or media backlash often focus on elites, such as government officials or business leaders, which runs counter to the assumption that scapegoats are selected for their lack of power.

Research on conspiracy beliefs highlights this misalignment, finding that under threat, individuals are more likely to assign blame to groups seen as powerful and intentionally harmful, such as political elites or foreign governments, indicating that perceived intent and influence matter more than vulnerability.¹² This suggests that scapegoating may be driven less by displaced aggression and more by broader identity narratives, perceived group status, or ideological framing.

The intergroup conflict variable

People often scapegoat those outside their group when they're frustrated or looking for someone to shoulder the blame. However, focusing solely on internal processes overlooks the complex interplay of social, historical, and political factors that shape intergroup conflict. Prejudice and scapegoating are often reinforced by broader societal narratives and existing group tensions, as opposed to simply being emotional reactions to a sense of personal threat.

A 2023 panel study of immigrant scapegoating in the Czech Republic found that societal crises, such as economic uncertainty or public health emergencies, can intensify preexisting prejudices, leading to greater blame placed on marginalized groups.¹³ These findings reinforce the importance of examining scapegoating within its social context. Combining insights from social identity theory and intergroup relations research offers a more comprehensive framework for understanding how group dynamics and power imbalances drive blame.

Yoko Ono and the Beatles

Yoko Ono remains one of the most recognizable cultural scapegoats of the 20th century. For decades, she was blamed for the breakup of the Beatles, a narrative that gained traction in the late 1960s and endured despite clear statements from band members, including Paul McCartney, that the group was already unraveling due to internal tensions.¹⁴ Ono’s presence at recording sessions and her relationship with John Lennon made her a convenient focal point for fan frustration, especially in a media climate shaped by sexism and hostility towards foreigners. 

Over time, the myth of her responsibility hardened, obscuring the more complex dynamics behind the band’s dissolution. Her experience reveals how public scapegoating can simplify cultural memory, obscure systemic or collective responsibility, and cause long-term reputational harm to individuals caught in the crossfire of a broader social narrative.

The Dreyfus Affair

In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army, was wrongfully convicted of treason for allegedly passing military secrets to Germany. Despite scant evidence, Dreyfus became a scapegoat amid a climate of rising antisemitism and national insecurity.¹⁵ The military establishment and much of the press capitalized on prevailing prejudices, using Dreyfus's Jewish identity to deflect attention from internal issues and to unify public sentiment against a common "enemy within."

This case exemplifies how scapegoating can function within group dynamics to reinforce in-group cohesion by targeting an out-group member. The Dreyfus Affair shows how powerful institutions can shift blame onto vulnerable people to protect themselves. The long legal fight and national debate that followed revealed just how tangled prejudice, politics, and the search for justice can become.

Why do we treat our in-group better than we do our out-group?

Why do we instinctively side with “our people,” even when the group boundaries barely matter? In-group bias helps explain the subtle, often invisible ways we favor insiders and exclude outsiders. This insight is key to understanding everything from office politics to national conflicts.

Group identification acts as a protective measure

When uncertainty rises, people tend to pull closer to their groups. This article explores how group identification offers psychological protection by reinforcing belonging and buffering against stress. It’s a revealing look at the quiet power of shared identity.

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