Construct · 5 fields · 9 citations
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The degree to which a person expects that reinforcements follow from their own behaviour or attributes, as against luck, chance, fate, or powerful others. Rotter fixed it in 1966 inside social learning theory as a generalized expectancy, one continuum from internal to external, measured by 23 forced-choice pairs plus fillers. In 1990 he wrote a case history of the variable and complained that it had been reified into a trait and a good-versus-bad dimension, neither of which he intended. What sets this meaning apart is that it is an expectancy about future outcomes, generalized across situations, and it says nothing about why any particular outcome happened.[1][2]
Beliefs about what determines one's health, measured on three independent scales rather than one continuum: internal (I keep myself healthy), powerful others (doctors and family keep me healthy), and chance (health is a matter of luck). Wallston, Wallston, and DeVellis built the Multidimensional Health Locus of Control scales in 1978 after their unidimensional health scale failed to predict behaviour, and after Levenson's split of externality into chance and powerful others. The difference from Rotter is structural: a patient can score high on internal and high on powerful others at the same time, which a bipolar score cannot represent, and the referent is health specifically, not reinforcement in general.[3]
Two things at once. Spector's Work Locus of Control Scale, published in 1988, is Rotter's expectancy narrowed to the workplace: whether promotions, pay, and getting a job depend on effort and ability or on luck and knowing the right people, sixteen Likert items. Judge, Locke, and Durham then proposed in 1997 that locus of control, self-esteem, generalized self-efficacy, and emotional stability are four indicators of one core self-evaluation, and Judge, Erez, Bono, and Thoresen showed in 2002 that the four load on a single factor and that the factor predicts job satisfaction and performance better than any one of them. In the second reading locus of control is not a construct in its own right; it is a symptom of a broader positive self-regard, and measuring it alone is measuring the core badly.[4][5][6]
A parameter in a person's beliefs about the production function: how much an outcome moves when they put in effort. Coleman and DeLeire modelled locus of control in 2003 as a belief about the return to human capital investment, so that internals expect schooling to pay and stay in school longer, and found the effect on completing high school and enrolling in college survives controls for ability and family income. Caliendo, Cobb-Clark, and Uhlendorff showed in 2015 that internal unemployed job seekers search harder, apply more, and set higher reservation wages, which is what a model of perceived returns predicts. Economists borrow Rotter's items but interpret the score as an expected marginal product, not an expectancy about reinforcement, and they care about it only insofar as it changes decisions with prices attached.[8][9]
Where a person places the cause of a particular outcome after it has happened: inside themselves or in the situation. Weiner's 1985 attributional theory made locus one of three independent causal dimensions, with stability and controllability the other two, and argued that Rotter had fused two of them. Ability is internal and uncontrollable; effort is internal and controllable; task difficulty is external and stable; luck is external and unstable. Locus predicts pride and self-esteem, controllability predicts guilt, shame, anger, and pity, and stability predicts expectancy of future success. The phrase locus of control is, on this account, a category error: locus is one axis and control is another, and a person can locate a cause inside themselves and still believe they could not have controlled it.[7]
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