Mistakes Were Made: The Agentless Passive as Blame Technology

Ronald Reagan, in the State of the Union address of January 1987, on the Iran-Contra affair: A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.

That is not the sentence this chapter is about, and it is worth noting because it is unusually good — a first-person admission with an agent in it. The sentence this chapter is about came earlier in the same address: mistakes were made.

William Safire's Political Dictionary traces the construction through American political usage back to the Nixon era, and it has been repeated by administrations of both parties since. Bill Clinton used it about 1996 campaign fundraising. Alberto Gonzales used it about the dismissal of US attorneys. It appears in corporate crisis communications continuously.

What makes it effective is grammatical, and there is direct experimental evidence for the mechanism.

Caitlin Fausey and Lera Boroditsky ran a series of studies at Stanford comparing agentive descriptions of events with non-agentive ones. Participants who read that she broke the vase assigned more blame and levied higher financial penalties than participants who read that the vase broke, even when both groups had watched the same video of an accident. Memory was affected too: participants who had read non-agentive descriptions were worse at remembering who had performed the action.

So the passive with the agent deleted does not merely soften the tone. It removes the actor from the syntactic frame that listeners use to build a causal model of the event, and blame has nowhere to attach. If the sentence contains no one who did it, then in the listener's representation of the event, no one did it.

Nominalization compounds this. Turning a verb into a noun removes the requirement for a subject entirely. There were irregularities. An error occurred. The decision was taken. Costs were incurred. Each of these describes something happening with no agent and, frequently, no patient either — nobody did it and nobody had it done to them. Events of this kind resemble weather.

The combination is the standard register of the incident report, the regulatory filing, the internal investigation summary and the public apology, and it is worth being precise about what it accomplishes: it permits the appearance of accountability while withholding its substance. Something has been acknowledged. Regret has been expressed. And the sentence contains no information about who is responsible, which means it also contains no information about what should change.

The test is mechanical and takes seconds. Rewrite the sentence in the active voice with a named subject. If you cannot, because the text does not tell you who acted, the omission is the message. Mistakes were made becomes I made mistakes, or my deputy made mistakes, or the board approved a policy that produced this — and the reason the original was written the other way is that all three of those sentences have consequences and the original does not.

Ask, in reply, one question: made by whom.