The Problems
Fundamental Attribution Error: The positive things in my life are due to my great personality, skills, talents and efforts. The negative things in my life are due to circumstances beyond my control. However, the positive things in YOUR life are due to circumstances, and the negative things are due to your poor personality, skills, talents and efforts.
Best thing about the FAE is that it works even when you are aware of it!

Blame: Different to fault, which is an actual problem, mistake or flaw, blame is an emotional response to a problem, mistake or flaw which allows me to avoid responsibility, locate the problem externally, avoid change, and in many cases, maintain hurt feelings about the fault. As you can see, blame and the FAE work together here to protect my ego, allowing it to avoid changing or preventing it from recognising any responsibility.

The Responses
The Difficult Questions:
How am I disowning the problem?
(After all, am I not part of the whole?)
How am I making excuses for myself?
(What�fs the first thing out of my mouth when someone accuses me? How often do I use that excuse?)
What (or who) are my favourite scapegoats?
(Who do I play victim to? Poor genes? That crazy bitch Timing? Do I plead good intentions or coercion?)
What are my response-abilities?
(Bearing in mind that I am not the Mistress of the Universe, what possibilities for choice exist that I may have missed, but can learn from for next time? What changes do I need to make?)

Cognitive Therapy: Fabulous stuff. Feeling Good worked really well for me. The suggestions and techniques were practical and easily practiced, and brought about genuine results. Basically, what it suggests is that how I think about things strongly influences how I feel about those things. In situations where I have no control, I still have control over how I react mentally to those situations, and how much I allow them to stress me out.

Links and References: Kathy Sierra has a great post on organisations forgetting about their users that could easily read as applying to teaching too, plus a great little bit on the excuses and little blames commonly used to avoid change and overlook response-ability. Also, Kuri has powerful but simple example of how effective cognitive therapy can be.
Kottler, J 1999, �eTaking responsibility without blaming�f in J Stewart (ed) Bridges not walls: A book about interpersonal communication, McGraw-Hill, Boston, pp. 459-470

Coming up soon: case studies of the above.

And just in case you are wondering, this is genuine essay preparation!

(Update: Links are fixed, sorry about that!)

• Kristen said on 06/10/06 at 08:39 PM.....

  I think most of my shortcomings are due to my own lack of skill/ability/harmony./whatever, and that positive things are more due to circumstance than to me. Does that give me reverse FAE or just low self-esteem?