Hey Trent, thanks for the excellent comment. It’s true that depressed people can be more realistic in certain ways (I discuss excessive self confidence here). But depression does cause people to have significant distortions that people who are not depressed are not as likely to have (for instance, systematically assuming that you will not enjoy activities that you will in fact enjoy). So negative emotion does cause distortions in thinking, even though there are certain cases where it can counter act pre-existing distortions like excessive confidence. Making yourself depressed would certainly not be an advisable strategy for making yourself have truer beliefs about the world!

I like your brand of intelligent self-help! You said:

“But negative emotions don’t just cause negative thoughts, they cause excessively negative thoughts, that reflect a distorted picture of reality.”

How do you square this assertion with depressive realism, the phenomenon in psychology research in which depressed individuals have a more realistic opinion about themselves and likely outcomes of future events? It would appear that humans have a built-in optimism; something like 90% or people feel that they are above average in pretty much every category, 95% of professors feel like they’re in the top 5% of professors, etc.

Now you specifically said that negative emotions cause excessively negative thoughts. Fair enough, but it at least seems possible that a small dose of negative emotions might actually counteract the rosy glow with which we naturally see the world.

Do you think we can learn to see the world how it is without being unhappy about it?

It is frequently counterproductive to strongly blame yourself or others for harms done intentionally, when the person could have predicted that those harms would occur and/or did desire that they occur.

Recognizing the nature of blame is a way to weaken the impulse to do it. Blame is not the way it feels: necessary.

Your example somewhat implies that the truth of the fact “If you had been more careful, I wouldn’t have biked into you!” would make them to blame.

It is true that those words are spoken by people thinking both that they are not to blame if someone else is to blame and that if the other person could have predicted those harms would occur, they are to blame. But the important thing is that it doesn’t really matter. There is a most useful amount of blame to feel that depends largely on things besides one’s intuition about how much blame is deserved.

The rules of the road are such that both a driver and a pedestrian need to be careless for there to be an accident. “If you had been looking, I/you wouldn’t have hit you/me!” is frequently true.

I think blame is different than other things you mention. For example, “Only an idiot would make that mistake,” is usually unproductive to think, but might actually be true. In contrast, “I am to blame,” is wrong if it is unproductive.

You’re absolutely right that blame is a human construct. Here, unproductive blame is being considered with respect to psychological health, not “correctness”. It is frequently counterproductive to strongly blame yourself or others for harms done unintentionally, when the person couldn’t have predicted that those harms would occur and did not desire that they occur. There are exceptions, surely, but this is a pretty good rule of thumb.

Placing blame on yourself or others when the blamed person isn’t really responsible.”

The word “really” is a warning sign that a sentence might reflect an equivocation in understanding, where one label symbolizes distinct concepts.

“If you had been more careful, I wouldn’t have biked into you!”

This is simply a counterfactual. Its truth would not necessarily mean that blame is appropriate.

Blame is a human construct like a fine or prison time. We commit to assigning it to entities that do certain disapproved of things to shape future behavior. It isn’t something simply deserved by people who could have prevented something bad from happening if they had done differently.

We may choose not to blame people whose actions are necessary conditions for bad things to happen so that we can concentrate blame on even more disfavored people. We may choose to blame people who couldn’t have done things differently.

An recent example of the first case is the mother who ignored her ex-husband’s violent threats to her kids, only to have him murder them. Comments in the news covering that are often careful to say she isn’t to blame when criticizing her judgment. An example of the second case is the Soviet experience against the German invasion in 1941. Military commanders who retreated were blamed more or less regardless of whether or not they could have stood fast, particularly if it was hard to determine whether or not they could have.

“Correct” assignments and distributions of blame are not written into the fabric of the universe. How much to berate victims who have suffered, in an attempt to deter future people from making stupid decisions that make it possible for them to be victimized, is a normative question.