Thank you all for joining me in such an impromptu manner. Let's see if we can generate a lot of listeners,

even though I only posted the promotion for this about eight minutes ago. Because today was a tough day. Why?

Well, for several reasons. I'll leave the main reason for a second, but I wanted to start off with actually an academic point.

So some of you have probably heard me mention before the self-serving bias, which is a very powerful psychological phenomenon that explains how it is that people attribute successes

and failures in terms of the causality of the so right so we all attempt things in life we

all experience things in life and we we can attribute those things internally.

This thing happened to me because of me or this thing happened to me because of something

outside of me.

Right.

And so some of you may have heard, and I'm actually thinking about, I mean, I'll definitely

be talking about this in my forthcoming book on suicidal empathy, but I'm thinking of actually

writing an article on it. And so you're getting, in a sense, first exposure to some of my thoughts

here. So, for example, there's something called the R-O-T-E-R, who was a psychologist, who created a psychometric

scale to measure internal versus external locus of control. So internal locus of control

means that I attribute what happens to me to internal dispositions. I did well on the exam because I'm smart.

Or I did poorly on the exam because I didn't study.

So both in this case a successful event or a unsuccessful one are attributed to me.

External would be, you know, I did badly on the exam because it was my fate, because the

professor is a asshole, whatever. And so the manner by which people attribute successes and

failures and certainly their ability to do so accurately is a profoundly important ability,

because that's the autocorrective mechanism that allows us to understand things that are happening in our lives

and then intervene, right?

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