Offenders routinely employ what are known as "cognitive distortions" to rationalize, justify, and minimize what happened in order to gain social desirability in the interviewer and to minimize responsibility.
John Tierney no doubt has nice partisan reasons for minimizing federal responsibility for the botched response to the calamity in New Orleans.
Rather than minimizing his responsibility by switching his old music off or refusing to produce more of the same he updates his strategy.
People may believe, irrationally, that by accepting a default choice passively, they are avoiding making a decision and thereby minimizing their responsibility for the outcomes of that choice.
Kuttner minimizes the responsibility of European welfare states for their own distress.
In "Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged" (1977), an almost Oedipal retort to Hofstadter, he made a blistering attack on the "therapeutic" society in which professional elites medicalize acts of will and minimize personal responsibility.
"The government likes to appear like they are actually doing something, so that they can minimize their responsibility".
Whenever women are continually burdened with preventing sexual violence we minimizes the responsibility of rapists, contributes to the underreporting of sexual violence, and reinforces a rape tolerant culture.
But when we consider our community's challenges, we tend to minimize our responsibility, imputing the problem instead to factors beyond our control.
Purdue has often minimized its responsibility for the larger crisis by pointing out that only 1.7percentt of opioid prescriptions are written for Oxycontin even though it is clear that the rise in opioid addiction and overdose began as that product was introduced and heavily marketed.
The accused student believed he had Vera's consent for intercourse, according to the same report, and he supposedly floated the possibility that Vera "sought to minimize her responsibility for having [casual sex]," or that she was attempting "to gain a competitive edge".
