Locus of control
A general expectation about whether outcomes depend on your own actions (internal) or on luck, powerful others and fate (external).
What drives it
Shapes effort, responsibility and stress. An internal locus drives action but, pushed far, produces self-blame and blame of others for what they could not control. An external locus can be accurate for people in genuinely powerless positions.
How it shows
Work
Internal: 'What could I have done differently?' after a lost deal; takes initiative, handles autonomy. External: 'It's who you know', 'the system's rigged', waits for direction. Position matters: people with less power often hold accurate external beliefs, and leaders with a strong internal locus can misread that as lack of drive.
Relationships
Internal: 'We can fix this.' External: 'That's just how men are', 'my family made me like this'. A strong internal locus in one partner can turn into over-responsibility for the other's feelings.
Self
When judging others' lives, notice whether you assume they could have controlled outcomes you could have controlled from your position. People high on internal locus often underrate how much luck and circumstance shaped their own success, and judge others harshly for it.
What tells it apart
Explanatory (attributional) style: Explanatory style is how a person explains specific events afterwards, including how lasting and pervasive they are; locus of control is the forward-looking expectation of whether action matters at all.
Self-efficacy: Self-efficacy is confidence in your ability to do a particular task; locus of control is whether outcomes depend on action at all, so someone can believe effort matters and still doubt they can manage it.
Illusion of control: Illusion of control is an overestimate in situations where control is objectively low; an internal locus is a general expectancy that is often accurate and shows across many situations.
A test
Ask what the person thinks decided a few recent important outcomes in their life; a consistent pattern of answering with their own choices, or with luck, others and the system, places them on the scale.
Questions to carry
- Asked what decided a few recent outcomes, how often does the answer name choices, and how often luck or others?
- Which outcome do I put down to luck or others, and what did I choose along the way?
How strong the research is
moderate. Reliably associated with health, achievement and job outcomes, but correlations are modest and Rotter's original scale mixes several distinct beliefs.
Where it comes from
Julian Rotter, 1966