Locus of control
Locus of control is the degree to which people believe that they, as opposed to external forces, have control over the outcome of events in their lives. The concept was developed by Julian B. Rotter in 1954, and has since become an aspect of personality psychology. A person's "locus" is conceptualized as internal or external.
Individuals with a strong internal locus of control believe events in their life are primarily a result of their own actions: for example, when receiving an exam result, people with an internal locus of control tend to praise or blame themselves and their abilities. People with a strong external locus of control tend to praise or blame external factors such as the teacher or the difficulty of the exam.
Locus of control has generated much research in a variety of areas in psychology. The construct is applicable to such fields as educational psychology, health psychology, industrial and organizational psychology, and clinical psychology. Debate continues whether domain-specific or more global measures of locus of control will prove to be more useful in practical application. Careful distinctions should also be made between locus of control and attributional style, or between locus of control and concepts such as self-efficacy.
Locus of control is one of the four dimensions of core self-evaluations – one's fundamental appraisal of oneself – along with neuroticism, self-efficacy, and self-esteem. The concept of core self-evaluations was first examined by Judge, Locke, and Durham, and since has proven to have the ability to predict several work outcomes, specifically, job satisfaction and job performance. In a follow-up study, Judge et al. argued that locus of control, neuroticism, self-efficacy, and self-esteem factors may have a common core.
History
Locus of control as a theoretical construct derives from Julian B. Rotter's social learning theory of personality. It is an example of a problem-solving generalized expectancy, a broad strategy for addressing a wide range of situations. In 1966 he published an article in Psychological Monographs which summarized over a decade of research, much of it previously unpublished. In 1976, Herbert M. Lefcourt defined the perceived locus of control: "...a generalised expectancy for internal as opposed to external control of reinforcements". Attempts have been made to trace the genesis of the concept to the work of Alfred Adler, but its immediate background lies in the work of Rotter and his students. Early work on the topic of expectations about control of reinforcement had been performed in the 1950s by James and Phares.Another Rotter student, William H. James studied two types of "expectancy shifts":
- Typical expectancy shifts, believing that success would be followed by a similar outcome
- Atypical expectancy shifts, believing that success would be followed by a dissimilar outcome
Rotter has discussed problems and misconceptions in others' use of the internal-versus-external construct.
Personality orientation
Rotter cautioned that internality and externality represent two ends of a continuum, not an either/or typology. Internals tend to attribute outcomes of events to their own control. People who have internal locus of control believe that the outcomes of their actions are results of their own abilities. Internals believe that their hard work would lead them to obtain positive outcomes. They also believe that every action has its consequence, which makes them accept the fact that things happen and it depends on them if they want to have control over it or not. Externals attribute outcomes of events to external circumstances. A person with an external locus of control will tend to believe that their present circumstances are not the effect of their own influence, decisions, or control, and even that their own actions are a result of external factors, such as fate, luck, history, the influence of powerful forces, or individually or unspecified others and/or a belief that the world is too complex for one to predict or influence its outcomes. Laying blame on others for one's own circumstances with the implication one is owed a moral or other debt is an indicator of a tendency toward an external locus of control. It should not be thought, however, that internality is linked exclusively with attribution to effort and externality with attribution to luck. This has obvious implications for differences between internals and externals in terms of their achievement motivation, suggesting that internal locus is linked with higher levels of need for achievement. Due to their locating control outside themselves, externals tend to feel they have less control over their fate. People with an external locus of control tend to be more stressed and prone to clinical depression.Internals were believed by Rotter to exhibit two essential characteristics: high achievement motivation and low outer-directedness. This was the basis of the locus-of-control scale proposed by Rotter in 1966, although it was based on Rotter's belief that locus of control is a single construct. Since 1970, Rotter's assumption of uni-dimensionality has been challenged, with Levenson arguing that different dimensions of locus of control must be separated. Weiner's early work in the 1970s suggested that orthogonal to the internality-externality dimension, differences should be considered between those who attribute to stable and those who attribute to unstable causes.
This new, dimensional theory meant that one could now attribute outcomes to ability, effort, task difficulty or luck. Although this was how Weiner originally saw these four causes, he has been challenged as to whether people see luck as an external cause, whether ability is always perceived as stable, and whether effort is always seen as changing. Indeed, in more recent publications he uses different terms for these four causes. Psychologists since Weiner have distinguished between stable and unstable effort, knowing that in some circumstances effort could be seen as a stable cause.
Regarding locus of control, there is another type of control that entails a mix among the internal and external types. People who have the combination of the two types of locus of control are often referred to as bi-locals. People who have bi-local characteristics are known to handle stress and cope with their diseases more efficiently by having the mixture of internal and external locus of control. People who have this mix of loci of control can take personal responsibility for their actions and the consequences thereof while remaining capable of relying upon and having faith in outside resources; these characteristics correspond to the internal and external loci of control, respectively.
Measuring scales
The most widely used questionnaire to measure locus of control is the 23-item, forced-choice scale of Rotter. However, this is not the only questionnaire; Bialer's 23-item scale for children predates Rotter's work. Also relevant to the locus-of-control scale are the Crandall Intellectual Ascription of Responsibility Scale and the Nowicki-Strickland Scale. One of the earliest psychometric scales to assess locus of control was that devised by W. H. James for his unpublished doctoral dissertation, supervised by Rotter at Ohio State University; however, this remains unpublished.Many measures of locus of control have appeared since Rotter's scale. These were reviewed by Furnham and Steele and include those related to health psychology, industrial and organizational psychology and those specifically for children. Furnham and Steele cite data suggesting that the most reliable, valid questionnaire for adults is the Duttweiler scale. For a review of the health questionnaires cited by these authors, see "Applications" below.
The Duttweiler Internal Control Index addresses perceived problems with the Rotter scales, including their forced-choice format, susceptibility to social desirability and heterogeneity. She also notes that, while other scales existed in 1984 to measure locus of control, "they appear to be subject to many of the same problems". Unlike the forced-choice format used on Rotter's scale, Duttweiler's 28-item ICI uses a Likert-type scale in which people must state whether they would rarely, occasionally, sometimes, frequently or usually behave as specified in each of 28 statements. The ICI assess variables pertinent to internal locus: cognitive processing, autonomy, resistance to social influence, self-confidence and delay of gratification. A small validation study indicated that the scale had good internal consistency reliability.
Attributional style
Attributional style is a concept introduced by Lyn Yvonne Abramson, Martin Seligman and John D. Teasdale. This concept advances a stage further than Weiner, stating that in addition to the concepts of internality-externality and stability a dimension of globality-specificity is also needed. Abramson et al. believed that how people explained successes and failures in their lives related to whether they attributed these to internal or external factors, short-term or long-term factors, and factors that affected all situations.The topic of attribution theory has had an influence on locus of control theory, but there are important historical differences between the two models. Attribution theorists have been predominantly social psychologists, concerned with the general processes characterizing how and why people make the attributions they do, whereas locus of control theorists have been concerned with individual differences.
Significant to the history of both approaches are the contributions made by Bernard Weiner in the 1970s. Before this time, attribution theorists and locus of control theorists had been largely concerned with divisions into external and internal loci of causality. Weiner added the dimension of stability-instability, indicating how a cause could be perceived as having been internal to a person yet still beyond the person's control. The stability dimension added to the understanding of why people succeed or fail after such outcomes.