Explanatory Style

Gregory McClell Buchanan, Martin E.P. Seligman, Martin Seligman, Gregory McClell Buchanan, Martin E.P. Seligman, Martin Seligman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317844150
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Clinical Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This is the first work to condense the large literature on explanatory style -- one's tendency to offer similar sorts of explanations for different events. This cognitive variable has been related to psychopathology, physical health, achievement and success. Compiled by experts in the fields of depression, anxiety, psychoneuroimmunology and motivation, this volume details our current level of understanding, outlines gaps in our knowledge, and discusses the future directions of the field.

Data from a vast number of studies are presented, including results from studies not previously reported. Coverage includes sections on cross-cultural comparisons, life-span and development issues, and gender differences; and an extensive description of the measurement of explanatory style offering questionnaire and content-analysis methods for children, college populations and adults. This work is thus a valuable tool for anyone involved in research on the etiology and treatment of depression, cognitive therapy, motivation and emotion, and the link between physical and psychological well-being.

1

Explanatory Style: History and Evolution of the Field

Christopher Peterson

University of Michigan

Gregory McClellan Buchanan
Martin E. P. Seligman

University of Pennsylvania

A concern with explaining why events happened as they did no doubt predates recorded history. Explanations are an important aspect of most philosophical, religious, and scientific accounts, and are found in the most casual conversation and commentary as well. In the last 15 years, psychologists have become interested in the possibility that certain individuals habitually favor certain sorts of explanations over others. Evidence has accumulated that explanatory style indeed exists and relates to a variety of important outcomes, including health and happiness.

The purpose of this book is to review these lines of research, focusing on what we currently know and what we may know in the near future. In this chapter, we start the story by locating explanatory style in its historical context. The explanatory style tradition is both theoretical and empirical. We suspect that a large part of the popularity of explanatory style is due to this grounding in well-defined theory, on the one hand, and straightforward measures, on the other. Explanatory style has not been without its critics, however, and we discuss the shortcomings—both actual and perceived—as well.

DEFINING EXPLANATORY STYLE

The general definition of explanatory style is quite simple: It is one’s tendency to offer similar sorts of explanations for different events. We can identify a style only by looking across different explanations; to the degree that individuals are consistent, we can sensibly speak of them as showing a style of explanation.

Complexity enters the picture when we decide just how we want to study explanatory style. Among the questions that must be posed, and subsequently answered, are:

1. What type of events interest us—those involving the self, or others; those that are good, bad, neutral, or ambivalent?

2. What type of explanations interest us—causal, teleological, moral, and so on?

3. What aspects of the explanations interest us—their literal content or their characterization in terms of abstract features?

4. What degree of consistency must be demonstrated before we identify it as a style?

As explanatory style research has been conducted, stances were taken on these issues and others, sometimes for explicit theoretical reasons, and sometimes for reasons of practicality or even for no good reason at all.

At present, when we refer to explanatory style, we mean more exactly the way that people explain the causes of bad or good events involving themselves along three dimensions. The first of these is the extent to which the explanation is internal (“It’s me”) versus external (“It’s someone else”). The second is the stable (“It’s going to last forever”) versus the unstable (“It’s short-lived”) dimension. And the third is the global (“It’s going to affect everything that happens to me”) versus the specific (“It’s only going to influence this”) dimension.

We expect a degree of consistency across the explanations offered by individuals for different events, that is, we demand that these correlate at above-chance levels. But we do not expect perfect agreement, in part because explanatory style is but one of several influences on the actual causal explanations that people offer, and in part because the consistency of one’s explanatory style appears to be an individual difference in its own right.

We have gone into this definition in some detail because explanatory style has become popular enough that other psychologists are questioning whether this particular definition is the best for all purposes. We gladly acknowledge that it may not be, and we encourage other researchers to look at explanations that do not entail causes; to consider explanations about other people; to study actual explanations rather than their abstract properties; to ascertain the simplicity or complexity of causal schemas; to study dimensions other than or in addition to internality, stability, and globality; and to study not the consistency of explanations but instead their waxing and waning. Indeed, we have explored some of these avenues ourselves, and we will do so further in the future.

We look forward to a fleshing out of the ways in which people make sense of themselves and their worlds. People no doubt have a variety of explanatory styles. A full catalogue of these styles, their origins and their consequences, would go a long way toward depicting human nature as seen from the vantage of explanatory style. At the present, however, explanatory style usually has the specific meaning we have offered.

THE ANTECEDENTS OF EXPLANATORY STYLE

Explanatory style has two ancestors. The one usually identified is the learned helplessness research tradition (Seligman, 1975), from which explanatory style emerged as a way of accounting for variation in individuals’ responses to uncontrollable events (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978). We discuss this ancestor first because its importance lies in explaining the details of why explanatory style has been defined by our research group in the way that it has. The second ancestor is a long-standing tradition within psychology that concerns itself with individual differences in thoughts and beliefs, and how these influence motivation and emotion. Although we have not always explicitly acknowledged the origin of explanatory style in this broad tradition, it legitimizes the very notion of an explanatory style.

The Learned Helplessness Tradition

Learned helplessness was first recognized in an animal learning laboratory. Psychologists immobilized a dog and exposed it to a series of electric shocks—painful but not damaging—that could be neither avoided nor escaped. When, 24 hours later, the dog was placed in a situation in which electric shock could be terminated by a simple response, it sat there passively enduring the shock. This was in marked contrast to dogs in a control group that reacted vigorously to the shock and learned readily how to turn it off (Overmier & Seligman, 1967; Seligman & Maier, 1967).

These investigators proposed that the dog had learned to be helpless. In other words, when originally exposed to uncontrollable shock, it learned that nothing it did mattered. The shocks came and went independently of each and every one of the dog’s behaviors. This learning of response-outcome independence was represented cognitively as an expectation of future helplessness that was generalized to new situations to produce a variety of deficits: motivational, cognitive, and emotional.

The deficits that follow in the wake of uncontrollability have come to be known as the learned helplessness phenomenon, and their cognitive explanation as the learned helplessness model (Maier & Seligman, 1976). Learned helplessness in animals continues to interest experimental psychologists, in large part because it provides an opportunity to investigate the interaction between mind and body (e.g., Peterson, Maier, & Seligman, 1993).

But psychologists interested in humans, and particularly human problems, were quick to see the parallels between learned helplessness as produced by uncontrollable events in the laboratory and maladaptive passivity as it exists in the real world. Thus, several lines of research looking at learned helplessness in people began. In one line of work, helplessness in people was produced in the laboratory much as it was in dogs, by exposing them to uncontrollable events and seeing the effects on their motivation, cognition, and emotion (e.g., Hiroto & Seligman, 1975). Unsolvable problems were usually substituted for uncontrollable electric shocks, but the critical aspects of the phenomenon remained: Following uncontrollability, people showed a variety of deficits.

In another line of work, researchers proposed various failures of adaptation as analogous to learned helplessness and investigated the similarity between these failures and learned helplessness on various fronts. Especially provocative and popular was Seligman’s (1974) proposal that reactive depression and learned helplessness shared critical features, such as causes, symptoms, consequences, treatments, and preventions.

As these lines of work were pursued, it became clear—in both cases—that the learned helplessness model was an oversimplification when applied to people. Most generally, it failed to account for the range of reactions that people displayed in response to uncontrollable events (see reviews by Miller & Norman, 1979; Roth, 1980; Wortman & Brehm, 1975). Some people indeed showed pervasive deficits, as the model hypothesized, that were general across time and situation, whereas others did not. Further, failures of adaptation that the learned helplessness model was supposed to explain, such as depression, were sometimes characterized by a striking loss of self-esteem, about which the model was silent.

In an attempt to resolve these discrepancies, Abramson et al. (1978) reformulated the helplessness model as it applied to people. The contrary findings could all be explained by proposing that when people encounter an uncontrollable event, they ask themselves why it happened. The nature of their answer—the causal explanation they entertain—sets the parameters for the helplessness that follows. If their causal attribution is stable, then induced helplessness is long-lasting; if unstable, then it is transient. If their causal attribution is global, then subsequent helplessness is manifest across a variety of situations; if specific, then it is correspondingly circumscribed. Finally, if the causal attribution is internal, the individual’s self-esteem takes a tumble following uncontrollability; if external, self-esteem is left intact.

The attributional reformulation of helplessness theory left the original model in place, because uncontrollable events were still hypothesized to produce deficits when they gave rise to an expectation of future response-outcome independence. However, the nature of these deficits was now said to be influenced by the causal attribution offered by the individual.

In some cases, the situation itself provides the explanation made by the person, and the extensive social psychological literature on attributions documents many situational influences on the process (e.g., Harvey, Ickes, & Kidd, 1976, 1978, 1981). In other cases, the person relies on his or her habitual way of making sense of events that occur; here is where explanatory style enters the picture. All things being equal, people tend to offer similar sorts of explanations for disparate bad (or good) events. Accordingly, explanatory style is a distal influence on helplessness and the failures of adaptation that involve helplessness.

Explanatory style in and of itself therefore is not a cause of problems but rather a risk factor (Peterson & Seligman, 1984a). Given uncontrollable events and the lack of a clear situational demand on the proferred attribution for uncontrollability, explanatory style should influence how the person responds. Helplessness will be long-lasting or transient, widespread or circumscribed, damaging to self-esteem or not, all in accordance with the individual’s explanatory style.

The Personal Control Tradition

The other ancestor of explanatory style is the tradition within psychology that looks at individual differences in beliefs with motivational and emotional significance. This tradition leads one to introduce notions like explanatory style in the first place. Why has this second ancestor been given less attention in our previous discussions than the first ancestor? We think the answer may be that it is a simpler and more glorious story to recount the progression:

animal learning →
learned helplessness in animals →
learned helplessness in people →
research anomalies →
attributional resolution

This is an origin myth, showcasing us as true scientists who attend to our results and revise them as necessary. So far, so good, but it does not touch on why we resolved the anomalies in this literature as we did, by introducing an individual difference in the tendency to offer causal explanations. Certainly other resolutions might have been possible.

Our decision to add explanatory style to the helplessness model was not motivated by the given studies that produced anomalous results so much as by the intellectual air swirling about psychology in the 1970s. The “cognitive revolution” had been waged, successfully. Indeed, the learned helplessness tradition was one highly visible sign of this revolution within one of the last bastions of the noncognitivists: animal learning. At the time that learned helplessness researchers were encountering anomalous results, cognitive ideas were ubiquitous.

Attributional interpretations in particular were common, especially in the softer areas of psychology, to which learned helplessness researchers had been led by the practical implications of their model. One could not pick up a journal without seeing an “attributional reinterpretation” of this, that, or the other thing. The only thing lacking was an attributional interpretation of attributional interpretations, but because we are providing one now, the world has at last complete closure on life from an attributional perspective. Amen!

Just what was this tradition from which attributional theorizing arose? We have elsewhere identified it as a tradition of personal control, concerned with how people’s thoughts and beliefs influence their attempts to control important outcomes in their lives (Peterson & Stunkard, 1989). This has been a long-playing tradition, and over the years, the specific role of causal beliefs has taken on ever-increasing importance.

In Cronbach’s (1957) terms, the personal control tradition is different than that of animal learning, which emphasizes situational causes of behavior. The personal control tradition instead looks at individual differences and internal determinants. People differ in how they make sense of the world, and these differences channel their behavior in some directions rather than others. In this way, beliefs are accorded motivational and emotional significance.

One of the important figures here is Adler (1910/1964, 1927), who introduced the notion of striving for superiority to explain why people pursued the goals they did. To be sure, striving for superiority was a drive, but it was a drive that made sense only in light of the beliefs that one entertains about one’s self and one’s abilities. Adler was influenced by Vaihinger’s (1911) “as-if” philosophy, which proposed that people act according to how they take the world to be. Said in the more modern language of attribution theory, people’s goals and motives are shaped by their beliefs about the causal texture of the world—by their explanatory styles, as it were.

Adler inspired a whole generation of subsequent personality theorists of the psychodynamic ilk, individuals like Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Harry Stack Sullivan, who are called neo-Freudians but should probably be identified as neo-Adlerians (Peterson, 1992). These theorists de-emphasized biological drives and instincts and instead suggested that people’s behavior is better explained by attending to the social situations in which they find themselves (Brown, 1964). Further, people do more than respond blindly to their conflicts. They also seek active solutions. Their egos are creative, and defense mechanisms are seen not simply as responses but as coping strategies. Again, these ideas can be recast, quite easily, in the language of causal attributions. Indeed, most if not all of the classic defense mechanisms are explicitly attributional, so we have another precedent for looking at how individual differences in causal explanations affect subsequent behavior: mood, motivation, and thought.

At the time that the neo-Freudian approach was coalescing, social psychologist Lewin (1935, 1951) was proposing his highly influential topological psychology. His central construct was the lifespace, defined as all the forces acting upon an individual at a given time. The lifespace was defined by Lewin as a psychological reality, not a physical one, which drew the attention of psychologists to the ways in which people interpreted themselves, their worlds, and the relationships between the two. Modern attributional theorizing owes an obvious debt to Lewin (Weiner, 1990).

Another important figure in the personal control tradition was White (1959), who argued that people are driven to interact in a competent way with the environment. He called this drive effectance motivation, and the feeling that accompanied it he called efficacy. Importantly, effectance motivation could not be reduced to tissue needs. It legitimized, once again, a view of people as motivated to master their world and to control its outcomes.

Still other contributors to the personal control tradition were McClelland (1961) and Atkinson (1957), who studied achievement motivation. They were interested in individual differences: Why were people at times driven to achieve—to accomplish something difficult against a standard of excellence—and at other times not? Because a standard of excellence is part of the definition of achievement motivation, one’s beliefs are put front-and-center. The person must believe that an outcome is worth pursuing, and he or she must constantly monitor progress toward that goal.

Atkinson was more analytic than McClelland, and subdivided achievement motivation into components: need for success, fear of failure, and so on. Thus, we see a statement that what people do is the result of a cognitive calculus: the weighting of different factors and their combination according to idiosyncratic rules.

At about the same time, attribution theory began in earnest with Heider’s (1958) seminal discussion of naive psychology. He discussed how people made sense of their own actions and those of others, and he explicitly drew psychology’s attention to how people answered “why” questions. Some of the contrasts he introduced—such as that between internal and external explanations—still dominate the field, as do such issues as whether attributions are accurate.

Heider’s naive psychology was seized upon by several different theorists, notably Jones and Davis (1965), Kelley (1973), and Weiner (1986), who made it into what ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Explanatory Style: History and Evolution of the Field
• 2 The Measurement of Explanatory Style
• 3 The Origins of Explanatory Style: Trust as a Determinant of Optimism and Pessimism
• 4 Explanatory Style and Achievement, Depression, and Gender Differences in Childhood and Early Adolescence
• 5 The Role of Causal Attributions in the Prediction of Depression
• 6 Explanatory Style in the Treatment of Depression
• 7 Hopelessness Depression
• 8 Explanatory Style in Anxiety and Depression
• 9 Explanatory Style and Achievement in School and Work
• 10 Sports and Explanatory Style
• 11 Pessimistic Rumination in American Politics and Society
• 12 Explanatory Style in the Context of Culture
• 13 Explanatory Style and Coronary Heart Disease
• 14 Explanatory Style and Health
• 15 Afterword: The Future of the Field
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index