Attributional Styles: Tell Me How You Explain Things And I’ll Tell You How You Feel

Do you know what we do from the first minute we are born? Learn. We really learn even before we are born. Did you know that language development already begins while in the womb?

We are an inexhaustible information processing machine We continually process what surrounds us. We need to understand it in order to adapt and interact with our environment.

And we learn mainly by association and by consequences, our own or those of others. In other words, in learning to explain how living works, we are continually looking for the cause-effect binomial. Following Heider, people act like “naive scientists.” We “study” everything around us non-stop to try to understand and explain it.

What is the important? What is happening or should happen? Why happens? Without realizing it, these are big questions that we have been thinking about since minute one. And in that task, and Each one, depending on their “teachers” and the environment in which they live, draws their own conclusions and creates their own attributive style

What are attributional styles?

Taking into account that attribution refers to the explanation of the causes of something happening, whether internal or external causes, with attributional style we refer to the tendency that each of us has when it comes to explaining what happens, based on one cause or another

What types of causes are usually attributed to what happens? What we are going to propose largely derives from Bernard Weiner’s theory of causal attribution. In this sense, we organize the causes based on 3 factors or dimensions.

1. Locus of control: where the cause is located

So, The cause can be Internal, that is, it is due to something specific to the person, or it can be External

Saying that “I passed because I made an effort and studied a lot” means attributing the cause to something internal, to a quality, effort. On the other hand, if “I passed because the exam was very easy”, it means attributing the case to an external variable, in this case, that the exam was easy, which could also have been due to luck, good or bad, to the conjunction of the stars…

2. Temporality

This factor refers to whether the causes are Stable or Unstable

If the cause is stable, it is assumed that that cause will always be present and therefore the same thing will always happen. On the contrary, if the cause is considered unstable, what is being assumed is that what has happened does not have to happen again.

For example, “I’m sure I’ll get the same results in all the exams” tells us that what happened will happen again, it presents a stable scenario regarding what happened. Faced with the same fact, an unstable scenario can be established, “this time I have achieved it, but I will not be able to take the next exam.”

3. Situational element

This factor refers to situations in which the cause is valid

In this way, a cause, what happened, can be Global, so that it will be present in all situations, or it can be Specific, and therefore only a reference is made to a particular situation.

“No matter what I study, I won’t achieve it”, makes it clear that what happened, what happens will be global and it doesn’t matter what is studied, where it is studied, the result would be the same. “I think mathematics is especially difficult for me, with biology it would be less difficult.” Either because biology is more interesting, entertaining… the fact is that the difficulties in studying focus on mathematics

Surely as you have read, a question has arisen: aren’t the three factors related? The answer, as it could not be otherwise, is that of course they are related. A person’s attributional styles are congruent in themselves A different thing is that they are consistent when they are questioned.

How do attributional styles influence us?

From the studies and theory of Heider (Attribution Theory), to the research of Martin Seligman that led to the Helplessness Theory to explain depression and its subsequent reformulations in 1975 (Abramson, Seligman and Teasdale), the theoretical builder of Attributions has been gaining the relevance it deserves.

Specifically, the perception of uncontrollability, or what is the same, the perception that what is done or not done has no relationship with what happens, has an important weight in the cognitive structure present in mood disorders and depression

Actually, it is rather the explanation given to this perception of uncontrollability that explains the hopelessness that is related to mood disorders.

Among many other theories and authors, these investigations laid the foundations and highlighted the importance of attributions and attributional styles. Although they do not explain everything, they do have a lot to say about disorders such as depression, anxiety…

And you: what style do you have?

Answering this question means questioning what theory we have built to understand and explain why things happen and how we “should” act.

The attributional style that each person has learned will undoubtedly determine what decisions they make and how they face their daily lives. To help us specify how we tend to attribute the causes of what happens around us, it is important to incorporate a new variable and observe how we explain successes or failures.

If we take this table as a reference, what boxes would you check for the positive (a success) and the negative (a failure) that occurs in your life?

Although it has mainly been investigated and associated with depression and mood disorders and anxiety symptoms, Knowing our attributional style is also a useful tool for knowing how we manage our daily lives, and ultimately managing our own life

Attributions and mood: how is it related?

Before continuing, it is important to highlight that not everything can be summarized or explained on the basis of attributional styles, people are much more complex and rich to be summarized in an attributional style.

However, many cases and our clinical experience highlight that Normally depression appears associated with a certain attributional style such as the following

Successes, positive events, tend to be explained based on external, specific and unstable causes. That is to say:

On the contrary, negative events are attributed to:

Therefore, It is important that we pay attention to our attributional style If you notice that you have to take responsibility for the negative but not for the positive, and consider that this will happen always and everywhere, hopelessness is likely to appear, and it is certainly not a good life companion.

We don’t usually realize how much information we disregard, and how we bias the way we perceive what happens to us. We tend to replicate over and over again the way we have learned to interpret things. Therefore, it is important to know what our explanatory hypotheses are, our attributional styles, and learn to review them and question them.