Pessimistic explanatory style in the historical record: CAVing LBJ, presidential candidates, and East versus West Berlin.

Abstract

Can pessimism and its consequences be measured across historical periods and cultures? One tool for measuring pessimism is the habitual way people explain the events that befall them, their "explanatory style" as found in archival documents. One way to measure the consequences of pessimism is to observe the symptoms of learned helplessness--passivity, poor achievement, and depressive signs--as they are found in the historical record. With these tools we can try both to test theories of explanatory style and to predict real-world behavior over historical periods and across cultures. In this article, we first present the theoretical background and describe our tools. In doing so, we detail a new method, the content analysis of verbatim explanations (CAVE), which allows blind, reliable ratings of archival material for explanatory style. Then we present three brief examples: President Johnson and the Vietnam War, prediction of who will win modern presidential elections, and pessimism in East and West Berlin. Our story begins with explanatory style and its relation to learned helplessness. Explanatory S t y l ePsychologists have frequently argued that causal beliefs affect behavior (see reviews by Harvey & Weary, 1984;Heider, 1958;Kelley, 1973;Kelley & Michela, 1980;Kelly, 1955). One approach taken by researchers studying causal explanations is to ask if individuals differ in their habitual style of explaining the events that befall them (e.g., Ickes & Layden, 1978;Peterson & Seligman, 1984). If so, then explanatory style becomes an individual difference of consequence. All the behaviors and outcomes affected by particular explanations may be influenced by explanatory style, which helps to determine the actual causal explanations offered in particular situations.The reformulation of the learned helplessness model accords central status to causal explanations and explanatory style (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978; see also Miller &Norman, 1979, andRoth, 1980). The reformulated model proposes that causal beliefs affect the nature of helplessness following bad events (Abramson et al., 1978). As such, they predict a potent psychological state, one that may underlie failure (Dweck & Reppucci, 1973;Peterson & Barrett, 1987), depression , illness and disease (Peterson, Seligman, & Vaillant, 1988;Schmale, 1972), and even death (Jemmott & Locke, 1984).According to the reformulation, one critical factor that contributes to where and when the symptoms of helplessness will occur is the particular causal explanation made by the individual for bad events. When failure occurs, a person asks why it happened. Certain answers to this question lead to pervasive helplessness, whereas others do not. Three dimensions of causal explanation are claimed relevant. First, causal explanations may refer to factors that are stable across time or unstable. The more enduring the cause, the more long-lasting the helplessness following bad events. Second, causal explanations may refer to global factors present in a variety of domains or to spec...

Significant samples: The psychological study of eminent individuals.

“…Therefore, many psychologists have endeavored to show that principles and processes that have been firmly established using mainstream methods have decided relevance for understanding political leaders of various kinds. Psychological findings that have thus proven their real-world applicability include (a) frequency of exposure effects (Grush, 1980;Grush, McKeough, & Ahlering, 1978); (b) physical attractiveness (Efran & Patterson, 1974); (c) explanatory style (Zullow, Oettingen, Peterson, & Seligman, 1988;Zullow & Seligman, 1990); and (d) implicit motives (Winter, 1973(Winter, , 1987a(Winter, , 1987b(Winter, , 1993.…”

Emerging from the CAVE: Attributional Style and the Narrative Study of Identity in Midlife Adults

“…Because of these stringent criteria, independent judges agree more than 90% of the time that a particular causal attribution is present (Zullow et al, 1988). They can then be coded by independent judges with 7-point scales, along the three dimensions: Internal-External, Global-Specific, Stable-Unstable.…”

“…According to the hopelessness theory of depression (e.g., Abramson, Metalsky, & Alloy, 1989), an attributional style (sometimes called "explanatory style") wherein negative life events are seen as having been caused by stable and global factors represents a cognitive predisposition for hopelessness, which, when combined with various sorts of environmental stressors, may result in depressive symptomatology. The CAVE technique has proven to be a useful method for assessing individual differences in attributional style as expressed in open-ended accounts of personal experiences and other forms of personal discourse (i.e., Peterson, 1991;Schulman, Castellon, & Seligman, 1989;Zullow, Oettingen, Peterson, & Seligman, 1988). In the current study, then, extensive life-story accounts told by adults from the community in are coded for stable and global attributions made in response to negative scenes and these scores, along with measures of personality traits, are related to self-report indices of depression and related outcomes (self-esteem, life satisfaction, and ratings of physical health).…”

Measuring Optimism in Organizations: Development of a Workplace Explanatory Style Questionnaire

“…This involves a technique called Content Analysis of Verbatim Explanations (CAVE) which was developed by Peterson, Luborsky and Seligman (1983). CAVE has been used in diverse research, including the investigation of the role of explanatory style in politics (Zullow et al 1988), stability of explanatory style over 52 years (Burns and Seligman 1989) and predicting physical health over a 30 year period . However, the CAVE technique is used in relatively few studies, possibly because it is more time consuming than using explanatory style questionnaires as it requires the training of judges to independently rate explanations over three dimensions.…”