Faulty Agency Assignment: Who Actually Did That?

In 2008, as the financial system collapsed and millions of people lost their homes, a curious phrase appeared repeatedly in the explanations offered by bankers, regulators, and politicians: "the market." The market had mispriced risk. The market had failed. Market forces had driven housing prices to unsustainable levels. This language accomplished something remarkable: it assigned agency for a catastrophe to an entity that does not exist. "The market" is not a person, not an institution, not an agent. It is a label for the aggregate of decisions made by specific humans at specific firms using specific incentive structures created by specific regulators. But the language of "the market" made those humans, firms, and regulators invisible.

This is faulty agency assignment: the linguistic and cognitive practice of attributing decisions, actions, and consequences to the wrong actor — or to no actor at all.

The Grammar of Vanishing Responsibility

The most studied form of faulty agency assignment is the agentless passive voice. Consider the evolution of a political apology:

"I made serious mistakes." — full agency, full responsibility
"We made serious mistakes." — agency shared, responsibility diluted
"Mistakes were made." — agency dissolved, responsibility evaporated
"The situation led to certain unfortunate outcomes." — agency transferred to an abstraction

"Mistakes were made" has become so notorious that linguists and political commentators have given it a special designation: the "non-apology apology" or the "exculpatory passive." The phrase is grammatically passive but strategically active — it accomplishes the social function of acknowledging that something went wrong while ensuring that no specific person is identified as the cause.

President Nixon used it after Watergate. President Reagan used it about Iran-Contra. President Clinton used it about Monica Lewinsky. President Bush used it about Iraq. The phrase transcends party and ideology precisely because it solves a universal problem: how to address demands for accountability without accepting it.

Corporate Agency Laundering

Corporations have developed sophisticated linguistic repertoires for faulty agency assignment. A few of the most common patterns:

"The company decided"

"The company decided to close the plant." A company does not decide anything. A company is a legal fiction — a set of contracts and registrations. Specific human beings — a board, a CEO, a set of executives — made a decision that caused those workers to lose their jobs. "The company decided" insulates those specific humans from identification and accountability. It is legally useful, because attributing the decision to the corporation rather than to individuals limits personal liability. It is also cognitively useful, because diffusing agency across an abstract entity makes the decision feel more inevitable and impersonal than it actually was.

"Restructuring was necessary"

The passive construction transforms a human decision into something resembling a natural law. "The workforce was reduced by 15%" implies that a neutral external force determined the appropriate workforce size. But no such force exists. Specific humans, exercising judgment, chose to reduce the workforce by exactly 15% rather than 10% or 20% or through different means. The passive voice erases those choices and replaces them with an apparent inevitability.

"The algorithm"

Digital contexts have added new vocabulary for agency laundering. "The algorithm flagged your content." "The system denied your application." "Our automated processes determined that your account violated community guidelines." Each of these constructions assigns agency to software — to a set of rules and weightings created by specific engineers, approved by specific product managers, and deployed under specific corporate strategies. The algorithm did not decide anything; people decided, and built a system to execute those decisions at scale while maintaining plausible deniability about their authorship.

Political Agency Assignment

Political language is particularly rich in faulty agency assignment because politics is the domain where accountability stakes are highest and the incentives to evade them are strongest.

Market Forces

"The market has determined that these wages are appropriate." Markets determine nothing. Labour markets produce wage outcomes through a combination of bargaining power, collective organisation (or its absence), regulatory frameworks (minimum wages, labour law), immigration policy, and corporate strategy. When wages stagnate, specific policy choices — weakening unions, suppressing minimum wage increases, loosening labour protections — are causally responsible alongside market dynamics. Attributing the outcome to "market forces" as if those forces were autonomous natural phenomena is not neutral description. It is a choice to foreground one causal factor (price equilibration) while rendering others (power imbalances, policy decisions) invisible.

History as Agent

"History will judge us." "We are on the right side of history." "This is the direction history is moving." History is not an agent. It does not judge, move, or have sides. This language is a rhetorical device that borrows the gravity and inevitability of natural law to endorse a particular set of political preferences. It also provides a convenient displacement of accountability: if history is the agent, then individuals and institutions are merely its instruments — which means they can't be blamed for outcomes they were "historically" destined to produce.

"Forces Beyond Our Control"

This phrase reliably appears in post-crisis communications from every organisation that had significant control over the crisis. Banks that took excessive risk explain that global financial forces overwhelmed them. Governments that underfunded flood defences explain that extreme weather events were unprecedented. Companies that used dangerous supply chains explain that unforeseen geopolitical disruptions made normal business impossible. Some events genuinely do lie outside any organisation's control. But "forces beyond our control" is almost never subjected to the scrutiny it requires: what specific forces? Why were they beyond control? What decisions made the organisation vulnerable to them?

The Cognitive Dimension

Faulty agency assignment is not only a rhetorical strategy. It is also a cognitive pattern — a way of perceiving and explaining events that systematically under-identifies human agency.

The Fundamental Attribution Error describes the tendency to over-attribute others' behaviour to their personal characteristics and under-attribute it to situational factors. Faulty agency assignment is in some respects the reverse: it systematically over-attributes outcomes to situations, systems, and forces, and under-attributes them to the decisions of specific actors. Both errors serve a function — one protects the perceiver's negative judgments of others; the other protects specific actors from accountability.

The Group Attribution Error is also relevant: we tend to attribute the actions of group members to the group as a whole, which can disperse responsibility across an entire organisation or demographic when specific individuals were responsible. "Wall Street did this" assigns agency to a heterogeneous set of institutions and individuals as though they acted collectively, rather than identifying the specific firms, specific decisions, and specific regulators whose failures were causally decisive.

Passive Constructions as Power

Linguist George Lakoff and others have argued that the political use of passive constructions and abstracted agency language is not accidental but strategic. Framing effects shape how people understand causality, responsibility, and appropriate responses. A community where "unemployment rose" perceives a different problem from a community where "companies laid off workers" — even though the two sentences can describe identical events. The first framing invites structural, macroeconomic analysis; the second invites questions about corporate decisions and potentially corporate accountability.

This connects to the loaded language pattern: the choice of grammatical structure is also a choice about how to frame causation and responsibility. Passive constructions and abstract agency nouns are a form of language that does political and rhetorical work while appearing to be neutral description.

How to Identify Faulty Agency Assignment

The antidote is a simple grammatical and analytical habit: always ask who the agent actually is.

• When you hear a passive verb, ask: who performed the action? "Mistakes were made" → who made the mistakes? "The decision was taken" → who took the decision?
• When you hear an institutional subject, ask: which humans? "The company decided" → which executives? Who was in the room? Who signed off?
• When you hear "market forces" or "history" or "the system," ask: what specific decisions created this outcome? What policies, incentive structures, regulatory choices, and corporate strategies combined to produce it?
• When you hear "beyond our control," ask: beyond whose control, specifically? What made it uncontrollable? Many events that are described as uncontrollable were actually made more likely by prior decisions that were entirely within human control.

The goal is not to find individual villains — complex outcomes genuinely do involve distributed causation and systemic factors. The goal is to ensure that the systemic factors are identified as systems of human decisions rather than as natural forces, and that individual contributions to those systems are not rendered invisible by grammatical sleight of hand.

Sources & Further Reading

• Lakoff, George. Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004.
• Pullum, Geoffrey K. "'Mistakes Were Made': Detecting the Sneaky Passive Voice." The Conversation, 2013. theconversation.com
• Jackall, Robert. Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. Oxford University Press, 1988.
• Tooze, Adam. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. Viking, 2018.
• Ross, Lee. "The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings." Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 10 (1977): 173–220.
• Washington Post: "The system is rigged": How politicians use the passive voice as a rhetorical cheat