Dan Savage, the brutally direct sex advice columnist, is fond of skewering correspondents who describe a long and predictably disastrous series of events and then disavow all personal responsibility for the outcome. “So you put that object where it was never meant to go,” he might observe, “and you lost it and had to go to the emergency room.” Then he follows it up with one of his signature phrases. “HTH?” he asks. “How’d that happen?”
We might ask the same thing about the events of our own lives. We get a letter from the government informing us that our tax return was incorrect and that we owe them another $1,252. This isn’t a random event; something brought it about. So, HTH? How’d that happen?
Renowned psychologist Martin Seligman focused for much of his career on the sources of lowered mood. He and his colleagues studied people’s ideas about the causes of different types of events and categorized their attributions:
Happy people tend to show a degree of balance in their attributional style. For example, an employee might receive the annual review of her work. Good or bad, she will likely attribute the details to a mix of her own performance (They’re right. I did work hard this year, and I did make that mistake on the Smith account) and externally to the job or the evaluator (Joan helped me a lot on the Chan file, so I can’t take all the credit, and the lease foul-up was partly the property manager’s fault). Some evidence suggests that particularly happy people tend to look a bit more on the bright side than might really be merited, blaming circumstance for bad outcomes and magnifying their own role in positive ones.
The bias seems to be stronger (and flipped to the negative), however, in the depressed. The attributions made by people in deepest misery tend to depend very much on whether the event is positive or negative. Positive events, like getting a promotion, scoring well on a test, or learning to water-ski, most often receive external attributions. The miserable will say that the task was just easy or that they were lucky. “Anyone could have passed that test,” they say. “Water-skiing is stupidly simple.”
In other words, the positive outcome has nothing to do with them. Although they might get a mild lift from the event, they do not interpret any deeper meaning from it in terms of their abilities or talents. The attributions for welcome events tend to be external (This says nothing about me), specific (Water-skiing is the only thing I do right), and unstable over time (Next time I’ll probably break a leg).
Negative events, on the other hand, tend to be given attributions that are internal, global, and stable. A fender bender in the supermarket parking lot, for example: I’m a bad driver. Always have been. Getting dumped by a partner: When people get to know me, they don’t want me. I’m unlovable. Rain during a beach picnic: I have never been able to plan things properly; everything I do gets ruined. These unwelcome events are viewed as being all about the person.
Needless to say, this is a game anyone can play. First, check out your existing style:
Then take a look at your attributions. Internal or external? Global or specific? Stable or unstable? You’re looking for a pattern that separates the positives from the negatives. Misery is best induced with external-specific-unstable for positives and internal-global-stable for negatives.
If you show the expected pattern, congratulations! You have already mastered this technique. Keep up the good work. You may skip merrily ahead to the next lesson.
If you don’t show this pattern, congratulations again! You have just discovered a new and unexplored avenue into the valley of unhappiness. Go back over your situations and rework your attributions. If something good (like passing your driver’s exam) happened, notice how it might be the product of luck, the undeserved generosity of others, or the ease of the task involved. Downplay your own role. That examiner was napping. He didn’t notice that I hit the curb when I parallel parked.
For your unwelcome situations (like a car breakdown), make it all about you—your stupidity, incompetence, or unlovability. I didn’t get the oil changed even though I knew it was due. Careless, clueless, and doomed—that’s me.
Once you’ve reworked your situations on paper, look out for new events—positive and negative. Work at practicing a slanted attributional style with them as they occur. When you have mastered this strategy, you should be able to drain the uplift of any positive event and maximize the impact of any negative one.