Catastrophizing occurs when people expect a
disaster or the worst to occur, even though the available evidence does not
support such an assessment. For example, catastrophization might be occurring
if you think that going to a party where you know only a few people will
necessarily be so awful that you won't be able to cope (and therefore will
absolutely have a bad time). It's possible that the party might be difficult
for you, but how could you really know until you got there? As a secondary
example, catastrophization is probably occurring when someone thinks to
themselves, "My boyfriend/girlfriend broke up with me, and it is the end of
the world! Nobody will ever want a relationship with me again in the future!"
Personalization occurs when you develop a
habit of overestimating your personal responsibility for causing things to
happen and start thinking that everything people say or do is somehow a
reaction to you. With personalization, if something bad happens we assume it
is our fault; that we caused it to happen. The opposite bias, Externalization,
occurs when we habitually refuse to see our role in causing things to happen
and end up taking no personal responsibility and instead, blame other people
and situations for our problems. Personalization is occurring when someone
thinks, "My relationship broke up so it must be all my fault." Similarly,
externalization is occurring when someone thinks "My relationship broke up so
it must be all my former partner's fault."
Filtering occurs when people focus on only
one part of a situation and form conclusions based only on that partial
consideration rather than looking at the entire situation and forming a more
holistic opinion. Filtering commonly occurs when people habitually focus on
negative aspects of life by picking out a single negative detail and dwelling
on it, while ignoring the positive elements that are also present. For
example, if someone tells you that you've done well on a task, but you
discount this praise, thinking to yourself that it can't be true because other
people did even better than you did, you're probably filtering. You may also
be filtering if you get a number of positive and negative reviews for a work
you've authored and only believe the negative ones.
Polarized thinking, sometimes known as
splitting, describes a tendency some people have to view the world in stark,
extreme black or white terms rather than to allow for the possibility of a
gray area or a mixture of characteristics. For example people who engage in
polarized thinking tend to view themselves (and others) as either a total
success or a total failure. Because there is always someone who is willing to
criticize, this tends to collapse into a tendency for polarized people to view
themselves as a total failure. Polarized thinkers have difficulty with the
notion of being "good enough" or a partial success. For them it is all or
nothing, and if they make one mistake then they will have failed completely.
Overgeneralization describes the tendency to
form a general conclusion based on only a few pieces of evidence. For example,
overgeneralization is occurring when someone fails one math test and then
concludes that she is lousy at math. There might be many reasons why the
someone fails a math test, including poor teaching, a difficult textbook, or
stress in the home. However, none of these potential causes are considered in
the rush to form a conclusion to explain the failure. Worse, the formation of
the overgeneralized conclusion will often cause the person to avoid math in
the future, and potentially fail to learn an important skill that could be
learned with a little perseverance.
The rush to overgeneralize often involves a tendency to engage in filtering
and personalization. That is, people who filter and only focus on negative
outcomes while ignoring the positive information, and who blame themselves for
a failure rather than considering how outside aspects of the situation may
have affected it are likely to mistake their limited negative conclusion for a
balanced picture of their entire situation. These people do not realize that
by projecting that negative conclusion into the future, they are
overgeneralizing, going beyond the actual facts and artificially limiting
options for the future.
Mind reading occurs when people make
inferences about what other people are thinking based on their behavior.
People who engage in mind reading assume that they know what other people are
thinking without bothering to check whether their assumptions are correct. For
example, when a friend walks by on the street without acknowledging them, they
might think, "I've offended her, so she is ignoring me," when in reality, that
friend is merely distracted and in no way feeling offended.
Control fallacies involve a bias of viewing
yourself as either more or less in control of your situation than you really
are. They are related to tendencies towards personalization and
externalization. People who personalize situations generally also believe they
have control over those situations that they probably don't have, and vice
versa, people who reject the idea that they can exert control over situations
are more likely to see themselves as passive victims of other people's efforts
to control them, and, as a consequence, to externalize.
Control fallacies can be quite easy to identify, or they can be subtle and
hidden. A good example of a more difficult to identify control fallacy occurs
when people come to believe that they are responsible for the happiness of
other people they care about, for instance, when a spouse tries repeatedly to
cheer up a depressive partner (who resists cheering up) and ends up feeling
like a failure as a result. It is not really possible to cause someone else to
feel happy, but if you have a control fallacy operating, you might knock
yourself out trying to make it happen.
A Fallacy of Change occurs when someone
believes that others will change their ways simply because that person wants
them to, or because those other people "should" act differently. This fallacy
occurs frequently in marriages and committed relationships when one partner
goes into a relationship thinking that their partner has unacceptable flaws
that will change over time. It can also happen within therapy relationships
when a therapist buys into the common fantasy that patients can be made to
change if only the therapist does his or her job properly. When the
relationship partner's flaws do not disappear after a while, the other partner
can feel betrayed, even though the "flawed" partner did nothing wrong by
remaining the same. The feeling of betrayal in such a case is not caused by
the partner who did not change, but rather by the collapse of the fallacy of
change idea as it is confronted and overwhelmed by the reality of no change
happening. Partners who feel betrayed that are aware of their fallacy of
change can come to understand that no actual betrayal has occurred. Instead,
they have the choice of either accepting their partner "as is" or finding some
other means of coping. If the betrayed person in not aware of this style of
thinking, he or she may instead blame the other partner in a process of
externalization.
When fallacies of change are in place, people blame, demand, withhold and
bargain to try to achieve the desired changes in their partners. The strategy
tends to backfire and make situations worse than they need to be. Usually the
partners who are targets of a change fallacy feel attacked and pushed around
and may become defensive and entrenched, rather than open to change.
Emotional Reasoning occurs when people make
decisions on the basis of what feels good rather than on the basis of a
systematic review of the evidence. In emotional reasoning, we let our feelings
guide our interpretation of reality. For example, if we feel like a failure
then we must actually be one. If we feel we are ugly then we must actually be
ugly. It doesn't matter if a hundred people we trust tell us differently, we
still conclude that the facts must be wrong when we are reasoning emotionally.
Depressed people very commonly end up reasoning emotionally. They may
engage in filtering and focus on one piece of bad news in a set of mostly
positive news, decide that this bad news means that things are hopeless, and
then conclude that because they feel hopeless that they must actually be
hopeless. It doesn't matter if they actually have some power to influence
their situation, because this fact will be overlooked as long as emotional
reasoning holds sway.
It's not just depressed people who reason emotionally. Almost everyone does
this sort of thing on a regular basis. People like to think that they are
usually logical decision makers, but unfortunately, this is not generally the
case. The way the human brain is wired, it is far easier to make a decision
based on feeling than one based on facts. We do not tend to look for facts to
support our conclusions; we just accept them because they feel right. For
example, people frequently decide who to vote for on the basis of their
feelings of pride or outrage or whether they'd like to have a beer with a
particular politician, rather than on a politician's actual qualifications to
hold office. Politicians harness this style of thinking by bombarding the
airwaves with negative ads designed to cause people to form negative emotional
impressions of opposition candidates every election cycle.
