The research behind Locus of Control
People can experience similar outcomes and come away with very different explanations for why they happened.
One person gets a promotion and thinks about the work they put in, the skills they developed and the decisions that positioned them for it. Another thinks about having the right manager, being in the right company at the right time or simply getting lucky. Most people probably recognize some combination of both.
Psychologist Julian Rotter became interested in these differences while developing his broader theory of social learning. In 1966, he introduced a concept that became known as locus of control: the extent to which people generally expect outcomes to be connected to their own behavior versus forces outside their control.
The distinction is often presented as a choice between taking control of your life and believing everything is determined by fate. Rotter's theory was more specific. It concerned the expectations people develop about where control over reinforcement tends to reside and how those expectations can influence future behavior.
THE RESEARCH
Rotter's work grew from a broader question about learning. If two people receive the same reward after performing the same behavior, will they necessarily learn the same lesson from it?
Rotter argued that they may not.
For reinforcement to influence future behavior, a person has to perceive some relationship between what they did and what happened afterwards. If you believe your performance produced the outcome, the experience gives you information about what you might do again. If you believe the outcome occurred primarily because of luck, chance or another person's decision, the same reinforcement provides less information about whether repeating your behavior will produce the same result.
Rotter described these differences using internal and external control of reinforcement.
Someone with a more internal orientation tends to expect that outcomes are meaningfully related to their own behavior or relatively stable personal characteristics. Someone with a more external orientation is more likely to expect outcomes to be determined by luck, chance, fate, powerful other people or circumstances that are difficult to predict or control.
To study these expectations, Rotter developed the Internal-External Locus of Control Scale, usually called the I-E Scale. Participants chose between paired statements reflecting different explanations of how outcomes occur.
The measure was designed to capture a generalized expectation rather than a belief about one specific situation. Someone could therefore lean towards an internal or external orientation while still recognizing that particular outcomes operate differently.
That qualification is important. Locus of control was never meant to imply that people believe they control everything or nothing.
THE FINDING
Why should these expectations matter?
Imagine that two students receive disappointing exam results.
The first believes the result was substantially influenced by how they prepared. They may conclude that studying differently, beginning earlier or asking for help could change the next outcome.
The second believes the exam was arbitrary and that performance depends mostly on which questions happen to appear. From that perspective, changing study behavior may seem considerably less useful.
The students are responding not only to the result but to their belief about what produced the result.
If behavior is expected to influence outcomes, changing behavior can seem worthwhile. If outcomes appear largely disconnected from behavior, additional effort may seem less likely to matter.
This helps explain why perceived control has been studied in relation to persistence, achievement, coping and health behavior. Across a large research literature, greater perceived control has often been associated with beneficial outcomes, although relationships vary substantially by context and the direction of causality is not always simple.
People's beliefs about control can influence behavior.
But their experiences also influence their beliefs about control.
Someone who repeatedly discovers that effort changes outcomes has good reason to develop stronger expectations of personal influence. Someone who repeatedly encounters unpredictable or uncontrollable circumstances may reasonably develop a more external orientation.
THE THEORY
Locus of control is best understood as an expectation about the relationship between behavior and outcomes.
This makes it different from simply being confident.
You can believe that you are highly capable while also recognizing that a particular outcome depends heavily on factors outside your control. A talented actor can believe strongly in their ability while knowing that getting a role also depends on casting decisions, competition, timing and what the production happens to need.
Likewise, someone can doubt their ability while still believing that their actions matter. A student may think they are currently weak at mathematics but believe that studying and getting tutoring will improve their performance.
Ability and control are separate judgments.
Rotter also emphasized the role of the situation. Generalized expectations become particularly relevant when a situation is new or ambiguous. When you have substantial experience with a particular environment, your specific expectations about that situation may matter more than your general orientation.
This is another reason it is misleading to treat locus of control as a permanent personality label.
You may have learned that effort strongly affects your performance at work while simultaneously believing that romantic outcomes are much less predictable. Your perceived control can differ across areas of life because your experiences in those areas differ.
NOT THE SAME THING
Internal control is not always more accurate
Popular psychology often treats an internal locus of control as the desirable end of the spectrum.
There are understandable reasons for this. Believing your actions matter can encourage persistence, problem-solving and behavioral change. A sense of agency is useful when action genuinely can influence the outcome.
But control beliefs are most useful when they have some relationship with reality.
You cannot control whether another person loves you. You cannot guarantee that a company hires you. You cannot prevent every illness, economic downturn, accident or unexpected event through sufficiently good decision-making.
Insisting that every outcome reflects personal choices can create its own distortions.
It can lead people to take responsibility for events they could not reasonably have prevented. It can also encourage unfair judgments of other people by assuming that unfavorable outcomes must reflect poor decisions or insufficient effort.
An external explanation is not automatically an excuse.
Sometimes external forces really are responsible.
The useful distinction is therefore not internal good, external bad. It is whether your understanding of control is reasonably calibrated to the situation.
WHY IT MATTERS
Most important outcomes are produced by a mixture of controllable and uncontrollable factors.
Consider looking for a job.
You can control whether you apply, how carefully you prepare your application, which skills you develop, whether you ask people for introductions and how you prepare for interviews.
You cannot control who else applies, whether the company changes its budget, what preferences the hiring manager brings to the process or whether another candidate happens to have exactly the experience the organization needs.
Treating the entire outcome as controllable creates unnecessary responsibility.
Treating the entire outcome as uncontrollable removes reasons to act.
The more useful question is often not Can I control this? because the answer for complicated outcomes is frequently no.
A better question is Which parts of this can I influence?
That distinction matters in relationships as well. You cannot control another person's behavior, but you can control what you communicate, what you tolerate and whether you remain in the relationship. You cannot make people understand you exactly as you intended, but you can decide how clearly you explain yourself.
It matters for long-term goals too. You cannot guarantee that a business succeeds, a creative project becomes popular or an investment produces a particular return. You can influence the quality of your decisions and the number of opportunities you create.
Agency does not require certainty.
It requires enough connection between action and outcome for action to be worth taking.
TRY THIS
Think about something you currently want but do not completely control.
Write down the factors that could influence the outcome and divide them into three categories: things you can control directly, things you can influence but not determine and things you realistically cannot control.
Be strict about the distinctions.
You can control whether you send an application. You can influence how an interviewer perceives you. You cannot control who receives the offer.
You can control whether you initiate an honest conversation. You can influence the quality of the interaction. You cannot control the other person's response.
Then look at where your attention has been going.
If most of it is directed towards the third category, move back towards the first. If you are treating everything as though it belongs in the first category, acknowledge the uncertainty that actually exists.
The point is not to convince yourself that you control your life completely.
You don't.
The more useful skill is learning to distinguish between what belongs to you, what you can meaningfully influence and what was never yours to determine in the first place.
References
Lefcourt, H. M. (1976). Locus of Control: Current Trends in Theory and Research. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Ng, T. W. H., Sorensen, K. L., & Eby, L. T. (2006). Locus of control at work: A meta-analysis. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 27(8), 1057-1087.
Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1-28.