The ABC Model
What is The ABC Model?
The ABC model is a mnemonic that represents the three stages that determine our behavior:
- Activating events: a negative situation occurs
- Beliefs: the explanation we create for why the situation happened
- Consequences: our feelings and behaviors in response to adversity, caused by our beliefs
The Basic Idea
Although we all encounter adverse situations, we also react to them differently. While one person might be patiently waiting and listening to music while facing a traffic jam, another will be angrily honking their horn and feeling anxiety building up. Why is this the case?
During negative experiences, the first thing we naturally do is subconsciously explain to ourselves why the situation happened. Our beliefs about the causes of adversity determine our reaction.1 Holding negative beliefs about why something might have happened can make us more likely to experience negative emotional responses.
The ABC model is a technique used in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a form of psychotherapy that helps individuals reshape their negative thoughts and feelings in a positive way. The idea of the ABC model is that it’s not external events that drive our emotions but our beliefs about these events.1 As such, understanding how we evaluate external events is key in changing how we react to them. CBT trains individuals to be more aware of how their thoughts and feelings affect their behavior, and the ABC model is used in this restructuring to help patients develop healthier responses.
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.
– Albert Ellis, psychologist and creator of the ABC model, speaking on its ability to build resilience
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
