Locus of Control - History

History

Locus of control is the framework of Rotter's (1954) social-learning theory of personality. In 1966 he published an article in Psychological Monographs which summarized over a decade of research (by Rotter and his students), much of it previously unpublished.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topic of expectations about control of reinforcement had been performed in the 1950s by James and Phares (prepared for unpublished doctoral dissertations supervised by Rotter at Ohio State University).

Another Rotter student, William H. James (not to be confused with William James), studied two types of "expectancy shifts":

• Typical expectancy shifts, believing that success (or failure) would be followed by a similar outcome
• Atypical expectancy shifts, believing that success (or failure) would be followed by a dissimilar outcome

Weiners attribution theory as applied to student motivation

Additional research led to the hypothesis that typical expectancy shifts were displayed more often by those who attributed their outcomes to ability, whereas those who displayed atypical expectancy were more likely to attribute their outcomes to chance. This was interpreted that people could be divided into those who attribute to ability (an internal cause) versus those who attribute to luck (an external cause). Bernard Weiner argued that rather than ability-versus-luck, locus may relate to whether attributions are made to stable or unstable causes.

Rotter (1975, 1989) has discussed problems and misconceptions in others' use of the internal-versus-external construct.