Explanatory (attributional) style
The habitual way a person explains bad and good events on three dimensions: internal or external, stable or temporary, global or specific. The pessimistic style explains bad events as 'me, always, everything'.
What drives it
Shapes whether setbacks lead to persistence or helplessness. For identification it predicts how someone will take failure and feedback, and the same style governs how they explain other people's behaviour.
How it shows
Work
Pessimistic: 'I'm not cut out for management' after one bad quarter; 'nothing ever works here'. Optimistic: 'that pitch didn't land with that buyer; next one'. A manager's style shows in how they explain a report's failure: 'he's useless' (internal, stable, global) versus 'he was under-briefed on that client' (external, temporary, specific).
Relationships
'We always fight like this' versus 'we're both exhausted this week'. Blaming, stable, global explanations of a partner's behaviour ('he's selfish, he'll never change') predict decline in marriages (Fincham and Bradbury).
Self
Listen to the grammar of your explanations: 'always', 'never', 'I am', 'he is' versus 'this time', 'in this case', 'I did', 'he did'. Run the same check on how you explain the people around you.
What tells it apart
Locus of control: Locus of control is a general expectation about whether outcomes depend on your actions; explanatory style is how you explain events after they happen and adds the stable and global dimensions, audible in 'always' and 'everything'.
Learned helplessness: Learned helplessness is the passivity that follows uncontrollable events; explanatory style is the habit of mind that makes it more likely and can be heard in speech before any passivity shows.
Overgeneralisation: Overgeneralisation is a moment-to-moment leap from one event to a rule; explanatory style is a trait-like habit measurable across many events.
A test
Collect a handful of the person's spontaneous explanations of setbacks, theirs and others', and sort them as internal or external, stable or temporary, global or specific; a consistent internal, stable, global pattern for bad events is the pessimistic style.
Questions to carry
- Listening to how a setback gets explained, how much of it sounds personal, permanent and spread across everything?
- After my last setback, what did I tell myself about why it happened and how long it would last?
How strong the research is
moderate. A pessimistic style predicts later depression and poorer outcomes across many studies, but effects are modest and the questionnaire measures are only moderately reliable.
Where it comes from
Lyn Abramson, Martin Seligman and John Teasdale, 1978; Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, 1984