Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [215]
The concept of locus of control and the I-E scale struck a responsive chord among personality psychologists. Since the scale appeared in 1966, some two thousand studies using it have been published, and for at least two decades it remained one of the more popular personality tests. Then it was largely supplanted by other and more sophisticated tests, but the locus of control concept has remained a staple in personality assessment.51 Many of the research studies using the I-E Scale showed how locus-of-control expectations affect behavior. For instance, elementary school students who scored as Internals got higher grades, on the average, than Externals; “helpless” children (Externals) did worse after failing a test containing difficult problems, “mastery-oriented” children (Internals) tried harder and did better. In experiments where volunteers were confronted with a dilemma, Internals were more likely to seek useful information, Externals to rely on others to help them. Among people hospitalized with TB, Internals knew more about their illness and asked more questions of their doctors than Externals. Internals brushed and flossed their teeth more than Externals. Internals were more likely than Externals to use seat belts in automobiles, get preventive shots, engage in physical fitness activities, and practice effective birth control.52
On the negative side, some studies have found that Internals are less likely than Externals to sympathize with people in need of help, since Internals believe that needy people brought their troubles on themselves. And although Internals feel proud when they succeed, they feel ashamed or guilty when they fail; Externals, in contrast, feel less strongly about either success or failure. (Normal and healthy personalities, some researchers believe, are balanced between Internal and External and explain their lives to themselves in a self-protective, if inaccurate, way: they tell themselves, the social psychologist Fritz Heider has said, “I caused the good things; the bad things were forced upon me.”)53
Social learning theory and locus-of-control research led to some notable developments in personality theory and clinical psychology. One was a growing recognition that conscious attitudes and ideas, not just unconscious ones, account in considerable part for the individual’s traits and actions. What the psychologist George Kelly called “personal constructs”—sets of conscious ideas about one’s own abilities and character, the behavior other people expect of us in various situations, how others are likely to behave in response to us, what they mean by the things they say, and so on—are important determinants of personality and behavior.54
Research based on this view has produced such interesting findings as the laboratory demonstration in 1978, by Edward E. Jones and Steven Berglas, of the ego-protecting tactic they labeled “self-handicapping.”55 Self-handicappers, faced with a situation in which they fear they may fail, protect their self-esteem by arranging things so that other people will attribute their failure to forces they could not control. A mediocre tennis player may choose only partners distinctly better than he so that losing will do him no discredit; a student about to take a final exam may burden himself with campus duties when he should be studying so as to have an ego-defending excuse if he performs poorly. The self-handicapper defeats himself in the effort to protect himself.
A particularly noteworthy byproduct of locus-of-control theory was the elucidation of a disabling phenomenon known as “learned helplessness.” We