00:00:00.240Hi everybody, this is Gad Saad. I wanted to discuss with you today the importance of how we attribute causality to the realities that we face.
00:00:12.160And it's something that I've discussed previously. For example, I've discussed the self-serving bias, which basically is the following.
00:00:19.160People attribute successes internally and failures externally. I did well on the exam because I'm smart and I studied hard.
00:00:26.140I did poorly on the exam because, you know, the professor was a mean and unfair person.
00:00:34.080And so, in many cases, when you attribute causality in an inaccurate way, it doesn't
00:00:40.220allow you to autocorrect, to make the necessary adjustments so that you don't repeat the pattern
00:00:46.840of failure. So, for example, let's look at another type of attribution error. It's called
00:00:52.940the fundamental attribution error. This is where you attribute, for example, dispositional qualities
00:00:59.160to a situational reality. So if somebody reacts violently, and the reality is that he's not
00:01:07.980dispositionally a violent person, but the situation at hand is what really forced him to act in a
00:01:14.440violent manner. If you misattribute something to a situation rather than to a disposition or vice
00:01:20.180versa, you're again committing an error of causality. Now, let's apply that to all sorts
00:01:26.320of situations. Let's suppose you get married and you then get divorced because your marriage failed.
00:01:33.880Well, there might be reasons that you did things that led to the failure of the marriage, but if
00:01:39.580you think that all of the causes of the failure of the marriage come from outside of you, then when
00:01:46.160you get married again, you're likely to repeat exactly those patterns. There was no self-insight
00:01:51.820that allowed you to say, well, here are three things that I was doing that led to the solution
00:01:58.820of my marriage. Let's apply it to if you're a businessman, you're an entrepreneur. I've known
00:02:03.600entrepreneurs in my family who could never accept that any decisions that they made might have been
00:02:09.540the reason why their business failed. It was always because the customers are to them, the
00:02:14.340venture capitalists are to them. They are perfect, meaning the business person. They're flawless.
00:02:19.620It's only the outside factors that cause them to fail. And not surprisingly, that ends up
00:02:26.580repeating itself endless times with endless failures. Let's apply it to groups of people.
00:02:34.880In Canada, we have the dynamic with the indigenous people. Now, the indigenous people,
00:02:41.040one could argue, had some unfortunate historical realities that they faced in their interactions
00:02:49.600with the people that came to Canada, right? But if a treaty was violated because of how we should
00:02:59.440treat the beaver pelts in 1739 and a particular tribe was violated, that can't explain why
00:03:11.100Indigenous people today are not doing well in Canada, right? What happened 300 years ago
00:03:18.080to people that are in no way related to you and by people that are in no way related to you
00:03:24.940can't explain why you can't advance today in Canadian society, because many people have,
00:03:33.340within their lifetimes, faced much greater trials and tribulations. We don't have to invoke
00:03:37.880something that happened in 1739 with the Iroquois and Algonquin to explain why an Indigenous person
00:03:45.560today is not doing well. They get to live in Canada tax-free, they get unbelievable1.00
00:03:50.580benefits that no other Canadian gets. They get free this, free that, and yet somehow
00:03:57.740they're able to always invoke what happened in 1739 or 1782 or 1644 to explain why they're
00:04:06.280failing today, right? But in my own lifetime, we faced execution in Lebanon, horrors of the
00:04:13.880Lebanese Civil War. This is not something that happened to my ancestors. Within my lifetime,
00:04:17.520my parents were kidnapped and tortured by Fatah my wife's family had to escape Lebanon for
00:04:24.500similar reasons that we did my grandparents had to escape some of my grandparents had to escape
00:04:30.780Syria and came to Canada to Lebanon my brother-in-law's family had to escape Alexandria
00:04:37.840Egypt they're Egyptian Jews to come here my wife's family some of their ancestors escaped
00:04:44.460Armenian genocide and on and on so we don't have to go to 1739 and yet we came we recognize that
00:04:52.120those historical grievances are real they're part of our identity we can remember them we can talk
00:04:59.840about them but they we don't use them as existential crutches forevermore right I'm moving to the
00:05:08.220United States, start a new life, whatever has happened in my previous life is part of my story,
00:05:15.300but brighter days ahead. But by always attributing the failures of your current situations to
00:05:22.300historical grievances, hence you're engaging in an attribution causality error, it doesn't allow
00:05:28.500you to advance. It's not a secret to life's success. Let's apply it to Africa. Every single
00:05:34.760African country has current realities that cause those societies to fail. Usually you have1.00
00:05:41.720dictators that don't have democracy, that loot all of the spoils of the society, and it's one0.98
00:05:50.300such dictator after another leading to the failure of all of these African nations.0.86
00:05:57.040The West has given endless amount of foreign aid to those nations that you would have thought0.99
00:06:02.120that they could now stand on their own, but they can always use the C word. You know which word
00:06:07.800I'm talking about? Colonialism. The reason why today every single African country may not have
00:06:16.020reached its potential, it's because of what happened in 1892 and 1794 and 1693 and 1902.0.98
00:06:24.620do. Therefore, we don't have to look inward in our society and say, are we doing something
00:06:31.820in the particular African society that led to the systemic failure of our society? It's because0.87
00:06:38.860l'homme blanc, the white man, that's what you get in Haiti. And so attributing proper causality,
00:06:45.960whether it be at the individual level, whether it be at the organizational level, entrepreneurial
00:06:50.520level, societal level is crucially important because if there's always an external factor
00:06:58.160outside of yourself for your failure, that's not a recipe for success. Have a good weekend, everybody.