Dr Raj Persaud at Science & Religion

Listen/Download [mp3 29MB]

This is the presentation given by Dr Raj Persaud at Science and Religion, hosted by CFI UK on 25/04/2009. Review of Dr Persaud's talk from Crispian Jago of Science, Reason and Critical Thinking (below).

Raj Persaud

I have to confess to not knowing who the final speaker was but I was filled in by some of my fellow attendees over lunch. I understand that Raj Persaud is a well known psychiatrist thanks to regular appearances on TV, and he was certainly a dapper and eloquent orator. The main focus of his talk was on the differences between “Internals” and “Externals”.

Raj starts us off with an imaginary scenario. Two people attend a job interview and are both unsuccessful in securing the job. The first person is an “Internal”; they take responsibility for their fate and view their failure at the interview as a consequence of their own qualifications and ability. The “External” assumes that there were forces outside of his control and he never had a chance of getting the job.

The external person gets more immediate gratification, although he didn’t get the job he can take solace in the fact that there was nothing he could have done about it anyway. The internal person however takes more responsibility and examines how he could do better in the future, peruses further education and skills and in the long term becomes better equipped for future job interviews.

These are traits that I can clearly recognise in a lot of people so I felt a lot of resonance with Raj’s talk. More disturbing however were the statistics presented showing a growing trend in the number of externals in the modern world today and the changes in our culture that fosters and promotes this type of viewpoint.