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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

When I make mistakes I blame myself. It is emotionally painful. A behaviourist would call it negative re-inforcement and wonder what behaviour becomes less frequent due to this negative re-inforcement.

Do I make mistakes less often? It doesn't seem to work like that. The behaviour that declines is that of recognising my mistakes. Not recognising my mistakes has the same drawbacks as recognising them but then blaming others.

Naturally mistakes should be collected and filed away as negative training instances. I do reasonably well when playing serious games of Go, intending to learn to play better. Over and above that one needs to be aware of the dynamics that ones emotional responses are creating. Both collection and filing are at risk.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

And yet people with internal attributional styles (ie, take blame for all of thier decisions) tend to be the most depressed... I would suggest that people critically examine how things in thier life occurred so they can make wiser decisions in the future, but not assume that they could have known to act differently before-hand. The word blame implies a moral failing or weakness of judgement that did not necessarily exist.

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