These things cause you to nitpick those around you.
The tendency to find fault in others can harm relationships and sour social interactions.
Sometimes, we don’t even realize we’re doing it.
And we certainly don’t like being on the receiving end of it.
Yet subtle criticisms through to outright judgments are common, despite their negative impact.
This fault-finding is often the result of unconscious defense mechanisms, biases, and social dynamics that influence all our interactions.
Exploring these psychological underpinnings will help you gain a deeper understanding of yourself and your behaviors and is the first step to addressing them.
So, what are the reasons we find fault in others, according to psychology?
Here are 9 of the most common:
1. Confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to look for, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms our preexisting beliefs.
These biased perceptions make it much harder to see what the actual truth of a matter is. We often seek evidence that will confirm our bias, and usually find it whether it exists or not.
Selective perception is one such confirmation bias.
Selective perception causes you to look for information that confirms your beliefs while overlooking or ignoring contrary information.
So, if you have a negative perception about someone based on stereotypes or unconscious biases from your upbringing, it can cause you to selectively focus on their faults, whilst ignoring their positive traits.
And when it comes to unclear or ambiguous information about them, you’re more likely to interpret it negatively than extend to them the benefit of the doubt.
Confirmation bias can also affect your interpretations of memories, making you recall interactions in a way that confirms your previous beliefs. You may find you completely misremember situations or create an alternative version of events that puts the other person at fault.
2. Displacement.
The mind employs an array of subconscious strategies to protect itself from anxiety, distress, and perceived harm.
These ‘defense mechanisms’ help people adapt to internal conflicts, but they also affect how we perceive and interact with others.
Displacement is a common defense mechanism that causes you to redirect emotions or impulses from an original target to a substitution that appears less threatening.
If you are experiencing negative emotions that you can’t express toward the actual source, you may unintentionally displace those feelings onto another, causing you to find faults in them instead.
For example, you may be frustrated at your boss, but rather than take it up with them you lash out at your family, finding fault with everything they do when you get home.
This displacement temporarily eases the frustration you feel toward your boss, but it’s a short-term solution and only serves to re-locate the stress rather than remove it altogether.
(And you’ll likely end up annoyed with your boss again tomorrow anyway.)
3. Projection.
People often project their undesirable traits, insecurities, and fears onto other people.
It’s another form of defense mechanism that protects you from having to face up to your shortcomings.
By constantly looking for faults in other people you will find them because you are essentially looking into a mirror. You’re transposing your own thoughts, feelings, and problems onto that other person.
But there isn’t always a direct causation. In many cases, you will just find what you’re looking for because your mind creates it.
That is, if you’re insecure and you’re projecting onto another person, you’ll interpret their actions and behaviors as insecurity even if they’re not.
A common example of this is unfaithfulness in a relationship.
Out of the blue, one partner starts accusing the other of cheating, demanding to go through their phone, wanting to know every detail of when they go out.
Why? Because they’re projecting their own cheating behaviors onto their partner, seeing their personal faults where they don’t exist.
4. Reactive formations.
Reactive formations are another type of defense mechanism.
They are attitudes or behaviors that are the opposite of our true feelings.
The mind creates reactive formations if we aren’t free to express ourselves safely, for example, if our true feelings and desires go against our society or culture’s morals and beliefs.
When this happens, you may develop exaggerated behaviors or attitudes that reflect the opposite of your feelings as a way of masking them.
This can lead to hypocritical judgments and fault-finding in others who display the behaviors or traits that you aren’t comfortable expressing yourself.
5. Stereotyping.
People are complex. Fact.
Stereotyping reduces the complexity of people down into simple traits. It’s a type of categorization, which in theory helps systemize information.
The problem is that stereotypes are often negative and are hard to shift, and people use them to justify their dislike of a particular group.
As a result, stereotyping directly causes you to look for faults in other people because you’re subconsciously trying to justify your distaste for that group.
Attribution errors are a significant part of the problem too.
An attribution error is when you associate the individual characteristics of a person to a group.
For example, if you think that a poor person you know is lazy, you may find yourself believing that all poor people are lazy.
But that stereotype is just not true. There are plenty of ‘working poor’ people, as well as people who can’t work because of chronic physical or mental health problems.
The stereotypes you hold don’t make you a bad person though. Everyone has some form of internal bias.
But if you regularly catch yourself finding fault with a specific group of people, you may want to consider whether it’s actually deserved or if you may be unfairly stereotyping them.
6. Competition.
People often look for any edge in a competitive environment. There are plenty of people out there who care little for anything other than winning.
As a result, they look for faults in others so they can gain an advantage to win.
It may not even be a circumstance you perceive as a direct competition. It could be that you and a co-worker are both angling for a promotion, you want to win, so you pull out all the stops to get the win, even if that means being negative about your co-worker.
Competition may cause you to perceive a situation as threatening to your success or status.
Because of that perceived threat, you may find yourself on edge and looking for faults to better defend yourself from someone you feel wants to harm you. Once again, it becomes a matter of looking for that competitive edge.
Furthermore, zero-sum thinking may cause you to believe that a win for someone else is a direct threat to you, even if you’re not competing.
For example, if your co-worker receives an acknowledgment for a job well done, you may feel as though that’s a direct threat to your perception of being a good employee, so you start to find fault with them.
The perception of being a good employee may be a safety blanket because you believe that being a good employee will get you raises and better opportunities.
But those benefits still exist even though your co-worker received positive acknowledgment. Their achievement only reflects on them, not you, so there’s no need to knock them down.
7. Low self-esteem and self-worth.
People with low self-esteem and self-worth often find faults in others to make themselves feel better about their shortcomings.
If they perceive other people as worse, that must mean they are better.
That perceived superiority allows the individual to feel important and worthy, feelings they may not typically have.
Fault-finding can be a validation-seeking behavior. The person with low self-esteem may gossip with others about how their target has this or that flaw, therefore, aren’t we so much better? The feelings of superiority and moral high ground serve as a defense mechanism to shield self-esteem.
But this kind of behavior can cost you relationships because often there’s no reason to dislike someone, you’re just creating a reason.
Instead of focusing on self-examination, people with low self-esteem may look for faults in others to avoid seeing real problems with themselves.
They are essentially distracting themselves from self-improvement by refusing to acknowledge their flaws in a healthy way, imposing them instead on a third party.
8. Cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is the psychological discomfort we experience when we hold beliefs, values, or attitudes that contradict each other, or when we engage in behaviors that contradict our values and beliefs, etc.
In the context of fault-finding, cognitive dissonance fuels behavioral and cognitive strategies to relieve this discomfort.
A person experiencing cognitive dissonance may justify their behavior by finding fault in another’s behavior, whether it exists or not. By focusing on the perceived faults of others, a person can maintain a positive self-image and relieve their psychological discomfort.
For example, someone who engages in unethical behavior at work that goes against their beliefs and principles may look for faults in their co-worker’s work ethic, whether there is anything wrong with it or not.
Another way cognitive dissonance can cause fault-finding is that a person may seek problems with or discredit alternative perspectives and beliefs if they threaten their own views.
They may reject alternative perspectives altogether by finding faults in those that hold them. This behavior allows the individual to maintain consistency in their beliefs.
For example, someone who holds strong political beliefs may create false narratives or dismiss other political beliefs as flawed.
9. Controlling behavior.
Different psychological behaviors arise from the need to be in control.
An individual attempting to assert control will look for faults in others to manipulate either the person or the situation.
By highlighting the weaknesses and faults of others, they can better display why they should have control. It allows them to reinforce their self-appointed sense of superiority and authority.
Controlling people often look for faults they can use to manipulate or gaslight the people they want to control. They will point out these flaws and use the individual’s feelings to manipulate their emotions and control their behavior.
But seeking control isn’t always about nefarious ends.
Some people seek control as a means of self-soothing their anxiety. It’s easier to identify and point out a flaw in another person than to accept flaws in oneself.
Others are perfectionists who hold themselves, and others to unrealistic and unattainable standards. Perfection is often another form of projection, where the perfectionist projects their fear of failure and insecurity onto others as a means of seeking control.
For example, a perfectionist may constantly criticize a co-worker for inconsequential errors, or constantly fixate on the shortcomings of their romantic partner rather than see all the good things they do.
Though the intent isn’t malicious, the outcome is usually the same.
Final thoughts.
As you’ve probably gathered, none of these fault-finding behaviors are healthy. And they can all contribute to dysfunctional and unhappy relationships.
But by recognizing the influence these psychological constructs have on your behavior, you can become more self-aware and develop greater empathy towards others.
If you’re struggling to take the steps to change this behavior, booking some time with a therapist could help.
They can provide an objective and non-judgmental opinion and guide you towards more understanding and compassionate thought processes and behaviors.
