Personalisation
Taking events as being about you or caused by you when there is little evidence for it, including other people’s moods and outcomes you didn’t control. Typical sentence: ‘He’s in a bad mood because of me.’
What drives it
Holding yourself responsible keeps a sense of control: if it’s my fault, I can fix it. It also fits a prior belief in one’s own badness. Burns includes the mirror image, blaming others for what is yours, under the same heading.
How it shows
Work
Takes a boss’s bad mood as a verdict on their work. Apologises for things outside their role (‘sorry the server went down’). A leader who reads a wave of resignations as personal betrayal rather than a market shift.
Relationships
‘What did I do?’ whenever a partner is quiet. Adults who grew up with volatile parents often carry this, scanning the room and assuming they caused any tension.
Self
Your first question about any bad outcome is ‘what did I do wrong?’ and you never get to ‘what else was going on?’.
What tells it apart
Guilt: Guilt follows something you actually did; personalisation assigns responsibility where the person had no real part. Ask what specifically they did, and whether it plausibly caused the outcome.
Spotlight effect: The spotlight effect is overestimating how much others notice you; personalisation is assuming you caused, or are the target of, what they feel.
A test
List every contributing cause and assign rough percentages; a personaliser gives themselves a share far above what the list supports.
Questions to carry
- Listing every cause of what happened, what share does the person give themselves?
- Whose bad mood do I take as being about me, and what else was going on for them?
How strong the research is
moderate. Clinically standard and captured in distortion scales, with little research on it as a separate construct.
Where it comes from
Aaron T. Beck, 1963; David Burns, 1980
On the family tree: Aaron Beck
Sources
- Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders (1976)