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Responsibility assumption


Responsibility assumption is the doctrine that an individual has substantial or total responsibility for the events and circumstances that befall them in their personal life, to a considerably greater degree than is normally thought. Strong adherents of responsibility assumption consider that whatever situation they find themselves in, their own past desires and choices must have led to that outcome.

The term "responsibility assumption" has a specialized meaning beyond the general concept of taking responsibility for something, and is not to be confused with the general notion of making an assumption that a concept such as "responsibility" exists. In particular the general use of the term "responsibility" in everyday life and the legal field in particular is about assigning or apportioning blame for an event; responsibility assumption suggests a greater ability to affect the future.

The main variable within various interpretations of the responsibility assumption doctrine is the degree to which the individual is considered the cause of his or her own experience, ranging from partial but substantial to total responsibility.

In its forms positing less than total responsibility, the doctrine appears in nearly all motivational programs, some psychotherapy, and large group awareness training programs. In programs as non-controversial as books on the power of positive thinking, it functions as a mechanism to point out that each individual does affect the perceived world by the decisions they make each day and by the choices they made in the past. These less absolute forms may be expressed within the rubric that we cannot control the situations that befall us, but we can at least control our attitudes toward them.

In its more absolute form, the doctrine becomes both more pronounced and more controversial. Perhaps the most prominent dividing line of controversy is the threshold of reversed mental causation, where sufficient responsibility is assigned to the individual that their thoughts or mental attitudes are considered the actual cause of external situations or physical occurrences rather than vice versa, along the lines of the catchphrase, "mind over matter". Detractors of this absolutist interpretation view this as victim blaming, whereas proponents view it as victim-empowering.


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