Abstract

In Rachel Handscombe’s previous article for the British Journal of General Practice she reflected on what training for a marathon can tell us about achieving and sustaining peak performance as a GP. Her prescription was ‘more rest, variety, encouragement, and acknowledgement that we are doing our best’ .1 This article is about the other side of the story, and it revolves around the person–situation debate (which has been raging since Sigmund Freud 130 years ago), that being: do we possess stable traits that can reliably predict the action we will take, or are we for the most part slaves to the situation? We struggle with the latter possibility because a sense of control is an important part of effective psychological functioning. However, an increasing number of psychologists are coming around to the view that we have far less agency than we think: ‘so decisions are being made, not by a conscious rational agent, but by the underlying [unconscious] processes. The rational self only notices the decisions being made and thinks that it is the author of these decisions.’ 2 The debate is highly relevant to the future of general …

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