Studies have shown the two to have the same effectiveness rate at treating depression, around 50%.
It turns out it is actually healthy to pass the blame. I'd suggest reading one of Seligman's other books, Learned Optimism, for more, but in studies of people in high-pressure situations (freshman year at Army, cold call insurance salesman at MetLife, etc), the most successful people are the ones who externalize (blame others for) negative events and internalize (credit themselves for) positive events. It may not be an accurate view of the world, but then again, depressed people score higher on assessing the world accurately than non-depressed people, so it's not clear seeing the world accurately is that helpful.
When bad things happen to me I make a concerted effort to blame other people or one-off events ("the company I was interviewing at went through a reorganization or promoted an internal person/it was just bad luck they asked about the same origin policy/whatever"), and when good things happen to me I credit myself ("I got the job because I'm smart, I work hard, and people like being around me.") When I say it like that it sounds a little silly, but so is not making moves in your career or your personal life that clearly make sense, because you don't think you're good enough.
Like anything, CBT takes practice. Eventually you want to get to the point where you do the recognition and disputation automatically, like tying your shoes or typing the letter 'e'.
Rather, I've always heard that it's best to think in terms of circumstances and not blame, for both yourself and others. There's a subtle difference between them. You've phrased it as "blame others, not yourself", but both of those alternatives are equally unhealthy.
Rather, you should figure out a variety of possible explanations for your low performance, and then ascribe meaning to the ones you can change and forget about the ones you can't. "I failed the test because I'm stupid" is a completely useless conclusion. So is "the teacher was in a bad mood". "I didn't study", however, is a very useful conclusion, because it suggests what you should do next time: study harder. So is "I don't actually like physics", because it also suggests a course of action: switch your major.
The overall point is to get out of the habit of learned helplessness and take responsibility for your own life. Blaming others doesn't accomplish that, because you've still attributed outcomes to things you can't control.
I read Seligman's book about optimism as well. He studied insurance salespeople for a time, which I think influences a lot of the advice. The best salespeople had a modicum of self-preserving delusion. Not enough to ignore correctable problems with their own performance, but enough to endure all the rejections one gets as a salesperson.
This advice is clearly more applicable to sales than to, say, spacecraft design. But maybe more things are like sales than we think.
Seligman's book is challenging to a hacker personality because he is saying that there's some information which it's best not to ruminate about. Many hackers are naturally inclined to perfectionism: analyze failures, perfect the technique before daring to try again. But a lot of success in life might just be about sheer persistence; trying again without dwelling on failures too much.
So, for a lot of the social professions, success is realizing that other people have minds of their own who may or may not agree with you, and that if they don't, that doesn't necessarily reflect on you or mean you're doing anything wrong. So if you blow an interview, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're stupid, it could just be that you drew a bad question or a bad interviewer or just weren't what the company was looking for.
I've been struggling with this for a while in the context of dating, which is another area where you'll face lots of rejection that usually isn't your fault. I think that's a lot healthier than to phrase it as "blame others" - you should respect others, but realize that what they want is not necessarily what you want. Heck, put that in a dating context and you can immediately see the problem: somebody who blames the girl when they're rejected is a creep, not a success.
> I think that's a lot healthier than to phrase it as "blame others" - you should respect others, but realize that what they want is not necessarily what you want.
The seduction community (/r/seduction to be specific) calls this outcome independence. A great deal of emphasis there is put on overcoming rejection.
I don't know, maybe it indeed works, but the problem is you have to believe what you keep telling yourself and that's hard. In regards to seeing the real world and your place in it for what it is, I think that the extremes are hurtful.
For instance many of us here posses an over average intelligence (whether we were born with it, or we acquired it through hard work that's another discussion). Also, many of us here have overinflated egos because of that.
I remember seeing case-studies of smart people that weren't as accomplished as they should be because of fear of failure and rejection. Continually telling your child that she's smart will overinflate her ego, expecting nothing but success after success. A few years later the real world kicks in, and this is a recipe for stress and depression. Another thing that happens is that many of us here are the smartest amongst our acquaintances. This creates sampling-bias; you genuinely start thinking that you are amongst the smartest people alive. But then you start competing with a global pool of other smart people, because of globalization and the Internet, and you witness how you're just a grain of sand on a beach full of smarter people that are more accomplished from a younger age.
I prefer intermediate thoughts rather than blame others. "I should work harder" works better for me than "teacher was in a bad mood", because the first statement might always be true, while the second statement I know deep-down in my gut that it's just an excuse.
> but the problem is you have to believe what you keep telling yourself and that's hard.
Well, no. You just have to start by believing less strongly your original negative thought.
Situation: "I failed this test".
Hot thought: "I'm stupid".
Belief in hot thought: 80%
Emotion: Shame
Evidence to challenge hot thought: "I passed the test last month with an 'A'"; "I do better than many of my peers at testing"
Alternative theories: "I didn't work hard enough. And I spent a lot of time with the wrong section of the book." "The teacher is new and inexperienced. I have as much evidence that they made a mistake as I have for me being stupid, so maybe they did make mistakes in grading."
New belief in hot thought: 50%
So, you're not trying to convince yourself that these other theories are correct. You're just trying to make the negative thoughts you have less strong, less over-bearing, less destructive.
It's an iterative process too - the first times you interrupt your thoughts you lessen the severity of the negative thinking, and then you begin to strengthen the possibility of the alternatives, and then it starts happening automatically.
It's fine to have some negative thinking. But that negative thinking should be based on reality, and should not interfere with your ability to live a day to day life. People with depression are not thinking negative thoughts like "I'm a bit thick, I should learn more about $SOMETHING". They're thinking "I am hopeless. I am worthless. I can't learn more about $SOMETHING because I'm stupid and there's no point in even trying."
Once negative thinking gets to the point where you cannot sleep; you do not apply to jobs because you "know" that you won't get them; you socially isolate yourself; well, obviously it's no longer serving a useful purpose.
This is a really good description of the process. The initial challenge for most people is to even be conscious of the hot thought (love that term). It's more like a flash that passes through your consciousness and immediately affects your mood. One you learn to catch it on the way through it's a lot easier to diminish it's power to affect your emotional state.
I've found as I gotten older that I'm much better at processing negative emotions and not letting them nag at me for hours.
Likely --- I haven't gone through them. I have no dog in this fight. I was merely offering the citations you requested, thinking you were genuinely interested in the topic. I won't make that mistake again.
I was specifically hoping for a summary of results that discussed, among other things, experimental design. You gave me a vague Wikipedia article that points at a lot of specific studies I could probably summarize myself, as well as a lot of specific refuting studies I could summarize as well, but that's about it. And that's assuming I could get access to all the papers that it cites.
I apologize if I misinterpreted your response. Your curt reply "Quite a few references refuting it as well" struck me as a sign that you were looking only for confirmation of your existing belief, rather than for new evidence.
Yes, the article is vague, but I thought the citations were solid. I felt (and feel) that if you had a true interest in the subject, they would be of use to you. You declared they were not. I was reminded of the cartoon of the angry mother shouting "But he was wearing a hat" to the fireman who rescued her drowning son. No, you'll have to research and read, but that's about the best you can hope for when asking for citations from strangers. And no, not everything is available easily and for free -- blame Elsevier.
You'll have to click on the "View" link in the upper right. I've only read the abstract, but it concludes that depressed individuals have significantly less positive bias than the non-depressed, but that both still have a distinctly positive bias baseline. Further, they conclude that studies that lack objective standards of reality and utilize self-reported measures are more likely to find depressive realism effects.
> Your curt reply...struck me as a sign that you were looking only for confirmation of your existing belief, rather than for new evidence....I felt (and feel) that if you had a true interest in the subject, they would be of use to you. You declared they were not. I was reminded of the cartoon of the angry mother shouting "But he was wearing a hat" to the fireman who rescued her drowning son. No, you'll have to research and read, but that's about the best you can hope for when asking for citations from strangers.
Wow. That wasn't a very civil or constructive response, either. I'm going to go ahead and take this discussion to email since I doubt anyone else is getting anything out of this anymore.
It turns out it is actually healthy to pass the blame. I'd suggest reading one of Seligman's other books, Learned Optimism, for more, but in studies of people in high-pressure situations (freshman year at Army, cold call insurance salesman at MetLife, etc), the most successful people are the ones who externalize (blame others for) negative events and internalize (credit themselves for) positive events. It may not be an accurate view of the world, but then again, depressed people score higher on assessing the world accurately than non-depressed people, so it's not clear seeing the world accurately is that helpful.
When bad things happen to me I make a concerted effort to blame other people or one-off events ("the company I was interviewing at went through a reorganization or promoted an internal person/it was just bad luck they asked about the same origin policy/whatever"), and when good things happen to me I credit myself ("I got the job because I'm smart, I work hard, and people like being around me.") When I say it like that it sounds a little silly, but so is not making moves in your career or your personal life that clearly make sense, because you don't think you're good enough.
Like anything, CBT takes practice. Eventually you want to get to the point where you do the recognition and disputation automatically, like tying your shoes or typing the letter 'e'.
I wrote more about it here: http://kev.inburke.com/kevin/lectures-for-basketball-coaches...