Externalising–personalising bias
What it means
The attributional style proposed in persecutory delusions: negative events are attributed to external, PERSONAL causes (the deliberate acts of other people) rather than to oneself or to circumstances.
Worked example
Failing an exam → "the examiner deliberately marked me down", never "the paper was hard" or "I under-prepared".
In the exam
Whenever anything goes wrong for him, a man blames the deliberate actions of specific other people — never the situation, and never himself.
What settles it
Externalising–personalising attributes bad OUTCOMES to other people’s deliberate acts. Hostile attribution misreads ambiguous behaviour as hostile in the moment; self-serving bias externalises failure to luck/circumstances generally, to protect esteem.
Classically confused with
Hostile attribution bias
Source: Bentall attributional model of persecutory delusions