Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [214]
Rotter and his graduate students conducted a series of experiments that demonstrated the pervasive influence of such generalized expectations. In a typical study, he or his collaborator would tell the volunteers—undergraduate men and women at OSU—that they were being tested for ESP. (This was a cover story to camouflage what they were really doing.) The experimenter would hold up, with its back toward the volunteer, a card on which there was either a square or a circle, the volunteer would guess which it was, and the experimenter would say he or she was either right or wrong. After a set of ten, he’d ask the volunteer to estimate how many he or she would get right of the next ten. Some students regularly estimated that they would do worse the next time because, as they later revealed in questionnaires and interviews, they ascribed their right guesses to luck. Others estimated that they would do better the next time because they attributed their right guesses to their skill at ESP, which they expected would increase with practice.
At about the same time, Rotter was supervising a psychotherapist in training, E. Jerry Phares, one of whose patients was a single man in his twenties who complained of having no social life. Phares urged him to attend a free dance held on campus. He did so, and several girls danced with him, but he told Phares, “It was just lucky—it would never happen again.” When Phares reported this to Rotter, it crystallized an idea he had been forming. Reminiscing some thirty years later, he recalled that moment:
I realized there were always some subjects in our experiments whose expectancies, like this patient’s, never went up even after successes. My graduate students and I had run various experiments in which we rigged the volunteers’ success or failure—we did so in the ESP series, and also in an angle-matching test in which we could control the number of supposedly “right” or “wrong” responses because the angles were so close that they looked alike and the volunteers would believe whatever we told them. Some volunteers, whether we told them they were right or wrong most of the time, didn’t change their expectation that they’d get most of them wrong on the next set. Others, whatever we told them, thought they’d do better the next time.
At that point I put together the two sides of my work—as practitioner and as scientist—and hypothesized that some people feel that what happens to them is governed by external forces of one kind or another, while others feel that what happens to them is governed largely by their own efforts and skills. Phares and I then worked out a test to measure the degree to which any individual perceives reward or the lack of reward as the result of his own behavior or as having nothing to do with it.49
Rotter called this crucial attitude—the major discovery of his career— “locus of control.” The test he and Phares developed to measure it, the Internal-External (I-E) Locus of Control Scale, is made up of twenty-nine items, each of which comprises two statements; the person taking the test says which of each pair of statements seems more true to him. Some typical items:50
2. a. Many of the unhappy things in people’s lives are partly due to bad luck.
b. People’s misfortunes result from the mistakes they make.
4. a. In the long run people get the respect they deserve in this world.
b. Unfortunately, an individual’s worth often passes unrecognized no matter how hard he tries.
11. a. Becoming a success is a matter of hard work; luck has little or nothing to do with it.
b. Getting a good job depends mainly on being in the right place at the right time.
25. a. Many times I feel that I have little influence over the things that happen to me.
b. It is impossible for me to believe that chance or luck plays an important part in my life.
Choices 2a, 4b, 11b, and 25a indicate that the respondent feels he or she has little control over events, the others that the respondent feels in charge of his or her own life. People who score