Consider the following four pairs of statements. Pick the statement that you agree with the most from each pair. Jot down your answers.
1a. Sometimes I can't understand how teachers arrive at the grades they give.
1b. There is a direct connection between how hard 1 study and the grades I get.
2a. People are lonely because they don't try to be friendly.
2b. There's not much use in trying too hard to please people, if they like you, they like you.
3a. Most of the time I can't understand why politicians behave the way they do.
3b. In the long run the people are responsible for bad government on a national as well as on a local level.
4a. What happens to me is my own doing.
4b. Sometimes I feel that I don't have enough control over the direction my life is taking.
These are samples from Rotter's Locus of Control Scale. You can see the whole instrument here. You can also try an online version of a complete scale here. To score your answers on the four questions above, scroll to the bottom of this newsletter - I have put the scoring guidance there.
The concept of “locus of control” describes a continuum of beliefs about how much we think we can affect outcomes in our lives. People who lean toward an external locus of control believe external forces or factors beyond an individual's control determine the outcomes of their actions. “Externals” tend to think fate governs their lives. People with an internal locus of control tend to believe that their choices, efforts, and abilities directly influence the results they experience. “Internals” believe they have a significant degree of agency in shaping their lives.
The literature (e.g., Galvin, et al, 2018 - see cite below) tends to see significant benefits to an internal locus of control for a variety of outcomes. Believing you have agency over your future motivates you to actually try to change your future. For example, people who have an internal locus of control tend to have better health behaviors. They are less likely to smoke, to abuse drugs and alcohol, more likely to exercise, and so forth. As a result, they tend to have better health outcomes, holding other factors constant. In the workplace, internals tend to show higher levels of motivation, engagement, commitment, and report lower work related stress.
People who have an external locus of control tend to suffer from anxiety and stress because they don’t believe they can control events around them. This perceived lack of agency tends to result in lower levels of organizational commitment, less engagement, and lower job satisfaction. Less agency also results in less effort at maintaining positive health behaviors, and as a result externals tend to have worse health outcomes.
Health outcomes were connected to status (and therefore control) in the Whitehall studies, a series of famous studies that looked at British civil servants and found that higher rank in the civil service was associated with better health outcomes, even when controlling for income. People who were higher in rank really had more control over their work, which gave them presumably a greater sense of internal control even beyond the workplace. Lower ranked employees, who had less control at work, were more likely to indulge in negative health behaviors such as smoking and drinking to excess in part because they had an external locus of control. They also experienced higher levels of heart disease - a condition closely tied to health behaviors.
Interestingly, there are instances where having an external locus of control is protective, and having an internal locus of control can be harmful. Internals tend to have worse work-life balance. In high pressure situations, internals can engage in self-blame even when outcomes really aren’t in their control, and as a result they are more likely to experience work-related burnout. In other words, when things really aren’t in your control, it’s not necessarily constructive to believe they are. It seems having a little more of an internal locus of control than is warranted is probably a constructive trait, but too much is likely to cause stress and anxiety from taking responsibility for things that aren’t your fault.
Human beings are complicated, and I think most of us have a mix of internal and external locus beliefs about different things. Probably some of those perceptions are accurate and some are not. I have pretty strong internal locus of control for most things, I think, but for the last several years I’ve been struggling with maintaining a body weight I am happy with. On a purely intellectual level, I am well aware that I can control my body weight. It’s a simple equation: calories in and calories out have to balance, or you get fat. But sometimes I just throw up my hands (usually figuratively, but I’m Italian, so sometimes literally) and just dig in to a pint of Ben and Jerry’s as if controlling my weight was outside of my control and I may as well just live for today.
I think having a mixed view about the locus of control is actually healthy, because some things are in our control and some are not. To acknowledge these things are in my control, but these things are in the realm of fate allows us to focus our energy constructively, closer to what we can actually influence. To quote the Serenity Prayer:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference
Living a worthy life involves taking our gifts and using them to the greatest extent possible to improve the things we can influence. We all have a limited amount of energy to pour into the world in order to try to improve it. If we take our limited resources (time and energy) and pursue things that we cannot really influence, we are actually failing to live as worthy a life as we might have. Even if we are low-ranked individuals (as in the Whitehall Study) with limited resources, we ultimately have control over our selves. We have an obligation to start there, and to cultivate the gifts we have been given. No one is completely at the mercy of fate. We have an obligation to build on the resources we have to do as much good in the world as possible. That is a worthy life.
To score the four introductory questions:
Score one point if you answered
1a
2b
3a
4b
A higher score indicates you have a more external locus of control. A lower score indicates you have a more internal locus of control. If you are interested in getting a more complete evaluation, I would do the entire instrument or the online one.
Citation:
Galvin, Randel, A. E., Collins, B. J., & Johnson, R. E. (2018). Changing the focus of locus (of control): A targeted review of the locus of control literature and agenda for future research. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 39(7), 820–833. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2275