But a relevant question is, do innocent people attempt counterattacks at a significantly lower rate? If both innocent and guilty people are roughly equally likely to attempt counterattacks, then just the presence of a counterattack isn’t strong evidence.
In movies and series it happens a bunch that people find themselves accused of something due to silly coincidences, as this ramps up the drama. In real life, such coincidences or huge misunderstandings presumably happen very infrequently, so when someone in real life gets accused of serious wrongdoing, it is usually the case that either they are guilty, or their accusers have a biased agenda.
This logic would suggest that you’re right about counterattacks being ~equally frequent.
Perhaps once we go from being accused of serious wrongdoing to something more like “being accused of being a kind of bad manager,” misunderstandings, such as that the “accuser” just happened to see you on a bad day, become more plausible. In that case, operating from a perspective of “the accuser is reasonable and this can be cleared up with a conversation rather than by counterattacking them” is something we should expect to see more often from actually “innocent” managers. (Of course, unlike with serious transgressions/wrongdoing, being a “kind of bad” manager is more of a spectrum, and part of being a good manager is being open to feedback and willingness to work on improving onself, etc., so these situations are also more disanalogous for additional reasons.)
In movies and series it happens a bunch that people find themselves accused of something due to silly coincidences, as this ramps up the drama. In real life, such coincidences or huge misunderstandings presumably happen very infrequently, so when someone in real life gets accused of serious wrongdoing, it is usually the case that either they are guilty, or their accusers have a biased agenda.
This logic would suggest that you’re right about counterattacks being ~equally frequent.
Perhaps once we go from being accused of serious wrongdoing to something more like “being accused of being a kind of bad manager,” misunderstandings, such as that the “accuser” just happened to see you on a bad day, become more plausible. In that case, operating from a perspective of “the accuser is reasonable and this can be cleared up with a conversation rather than by counterattacking them” is something we should expect to see more often from actually “innocent” managers. (Of course, unlike with serious transgressions/wrongdoing, being a “kind of bad” manager is more of a spectrum, and part of being a good manager is being open to feedback and willingness to work on improving onself, etc., so these situations are also more disanalogous for additional reasons.)