Taking control of your happiness and productivity

Work overdetermination into your model. Overdetermination is like execution by a firing squad, getting 12 shots of which there are 6 that would be enough to kill the condemned alone. So you cannot say which shot killed him, because you could take any away and he is still dead, in fact you could take any five of the six away and he is still dead.

Overdetermination means external factors can predict 80% of your success and yet internal factors could also predict 80% of your success.

In an overdetermined system, just because it is factually accurate that external factors have a huge influence, it does not follow they have more influence than internal ones or that the internal ones are still not huge.

The mistake here may be that you examine the firing squad victim and you find a bullet through the heart with "external factors" written on it, and you stop the investigation there because it is clearly enough to cause the death and thus you have your answer. But you would find another five bullets in another crucial locations with "internal factors" written on them which kill the victim just as well.

Speculatively, people who have never suffered a serious setback at the hands of others may be biased in favor of thinking they are the only ones who exercise control over their own outcomes. That might well explain why they self-report as happier- they're less likely to be inconvenienced!

It sounds like a virtually impossible task to disentangle internal and external factors to see which plays a bigger role, honestly. Any given incident may have causes that come from both camps, and any given event can easily be interpreted either way. As in, were you turned down at the job interview because the HR guy dislikes candidates wearing blue ties, or because you exercised a poor fashion sense decision and wore a blue tie the HR guy didn't like?

The latter attitude of internalizing everything sounds suspiciously like treating everyone else as an NPC...

Does anyone know if chronic narcissists or psychopaths are on average likely to self-report as happier than regular people?

This, I think. It looks to me like an attempt to deliberately invoke the Fundamental Attribution Error on oneself.

That said, I still think there's a core of use here. Picture a game involving a couple of dice -- say one four-sided die and one six-sided die. To win the game you need to roll above, say, 8. The catch is that the d6 is rolled as usual (chance), but the d4 can be influenced -- in the easiest case you can just set it on the table however you like, harder cases require some set of difficult actions to get a particular roll.

It's pretty clear that you have some control over this outcome. In fact, it's necessary to exert some control if you want to win, because the chance die can't reach the winning value alone. On the other hand, sometimes chance will screw you sufficiently thoroughly that no amount of effort will suffice. This seems like a pretty good model of how life works, and justifies discarding both the "it's all me, I put all this effort in and failed and that is evidence that I am a Platonic Failure" attitude and the "it's all chance, no point in putting in the effort" attitude.

I think of internal vs. external locus as more like a decision or a purpose than a belief.

I read the article as a piece of self-help/personal development writing. Part of the corresponding reading protocol is that I interpret all questions to the reader at the beginning as being intended to prime a response contrasting with the article's message.

Anyway, those three questions are just the short form quoted from the slides in reference [4]. The full version used as a psychological scale is linked in reference [1]. It includes the scoring key. I achieved a perfect "internal locus" score, even though I left two questions unanswered. They and several others turned out to be unscored. I guess they are there to camouflage the purpose of the test. (I presume that when the test is actually administered, it isn't labelled in big letters, "Rotter's Locus of Control Scale".)

Saying that language is ill-defined dodges the issue. People do have beliefs and those beliefs are made up of language.

Maybe it's helpful to think about the question as checking aliefs. Which of the two resonates more? Which produces a bigger feeling of agreement?

Working with people who are in denial about their beliefs they have because they focus on a intellectual answer to such a question can be hard.

Agreement with such statements is not informed by factual or moral questions, but is a function of definitions of their terms and can't be evaluated when the terms remain undefined.

That's also not the point of the exercise. The exercise is about taking account for the beliefs that the reader holds