I grew up with Conrad Hake and can attest he is off-the-charts smart. He has advanced degrees in social psychology, computer science and something I can’t spell. Over the years, I have done a lot of reading on positive thinking yet I have never-ever heard of these two theories, so I thought I would pass them along. He contributes to WWDS when time permits.

In a former life, I went to grad school in social psychology at KU. My sponsoring professor was a specialist in Attribution Theory and was developing a new specialty within it called Exacerbation Theory. Attribution Theory really goes with what you are saying on your blog:

 

positive people know that most setbacks can be attributed to external causes which can be challenged, fixed or changed, not them. Negative people tend to think these are self afflicted, deserved, and permanent wounds.

 

The whole of Attribution Theory looks at whether a person primarily attributes causality to themselves or to external agents. Each has pluses and minuses, but for the person who attributes causality to themselves, its negative side can be amplified by exacerbation, dwelling on it, “stirring it.” It is one of the sources of stuttering. People responding to normal disfluencies by dwelling on them until they are terrified about their next utterance, tying themselves up. Kind of like asking the millipede how it can walk with all those legs and returning in 15 minutes to find it with twisted legs, fretting in the ditch.

~by Conrad Hake

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