WSC’s Twenty-ninth Meeting

World Speakers’ Coalition Kuala Lumpur's 29th meeting on Thursday was at an Italian place, Fellini Ristorante & Caffe, in Jalan Gasing, Petaling Jaya. This time around, Steffi Chuah opted to organize and host and the meeting theme she chose was "The Illusion of Control".

 

Seven members turned up.

 

The illusion of control, a term first coined by psychologist Ellen Langer, is the tendency for people to believe that they have more control over things than they really do. This leads us to overestimate our odds of succeeding or getting a positive outcome, and to invent explanations linking our behavior to some result.

 

Originally, it was thought that the illusion of control is a mechanism for preserving or enhancing self-esteem, allowing people to take credit for successful actions and to deny responsibility for failures, and it is strongest in people most personally involved in the action. 

 

Recent studies suggest it is not necessarily a motivated behavior but, rather, results from mistaken judgments of contingency. In this view it is an illusion of causality – people’s sense of control is misled by their likelihood of taking action.

 

TBH, a majority of us gladly suffer from this illusion of control. 

 

Really, this is a good theme that Steffi came up with. And it calls for personal stories, and the retelling of each story is unique to the individual speaker.

 

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