Locus of Control

Current Trends in Theory & Research

H. M. Lefcourt

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317757665
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

First published in 1982. Since the publication of the first edition of this book, much research has been reported that is pertinent to if not directly concerned with the locus of control construct. The purpose of this new edition is to help researchers keep abreast of the widespread developments in this field while retaining an understanding of the sources and major assumptions from which this research endeavour has evolved.

1	Locus of Control: Understanding the Concept

INTRODUCTION

Man has reached a stage in his history that surrounds him with challenges to his very survival. Faced with problems of overpopulation and the consequent overcrowding, discomfort, and environmental pollution, he can easily come to feel overburdened, irritable, and hopeless. The title of the Broadway musical “Stop the World I Want To Get Off” is a common distillation of the thoughts of many an urban dweller. One of the most disturbing accompaniments of population density has been the sharp increase in incidents of violence, with the resulting insecurity to which urban dwellers have become accustomed. Robberies, assaults, murders, and rape, sometimes with no apparent purpose, have become commonplace in sections of many large cities. Citizens purchase weapons for protection of their homes and certain communities establish protective wire or electronic screening devices with guarded entrances to protect themselves against marauders. In New York City, the number of large guard dogs is said to be enjoying such an increase that a street sanitation problem has developed.

If it were not so serious, much of the world today could be construed as a bad joke. When we consider the repeated evidence of man’s cruelty to man throughout history, it is possible to question whether man is likely to survive in the relatively free state within which he lives today, crowded closer together with others and dependent upon some belief in the ephemeral good will or conscience within himself and others for his daily feelings of safety.

Writers such as Arthur Koestler (1967) and Hannah Arendt (1963), and psychological researchers such as Stanley Milgram (1963), lead us to believe that man is indeed a creature strange enough that he might be capable of destroying himself and his planet for what would seem to be trivial reasons: a desire for social approval or loyalty to one’s in-group, for example. Given these negative views of man’s nature, some commentators have stressed the need for man to surrender his myths of freedom and sovereignty. Norman Cousins, editor emeritus of Saturday Review, has repeatedly called upon nations to acknowledge the fruitlessness of national sovereignty and to submit to world law and order. Sovereignty is said to be an anachronism in a time of accelerating speed of communication, travel, and weapons development, and with the consequent increasing rate of crisis occurrence.

On the more personal level, the behaviorist B. F. Skinner argues that man must surrender his myths of freedom and will (Skinner, 1971). Despite the oppressive tone of Skinner’s book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, it has become a best seller, something unusual for the writings of psychologists. Whereas Norman Cousins’ formulations of world order seem appealing to persons of liberal sensibilities, Skinner’s derogation of free will does not. Carl Rogers, Rollo May, Arthur Koestler, and others view these Skinnerian pronouncements as totalitarian in nature (Time, 1971).

In Skinner’s thinking, man must relinquish his belief in freedom and self-determination and come to accept the fact that he is controlled by forces outside himself. With such acceptance, Skinner believes, man will become more responsive to those controlling forces that reinforce what is more naturally acceptable to humans. Today’s relatively random world, in which normlessness and unpredictability prevail, would thus cease to be, as man would avail himself of rewards for more orderly and mannerly behavior. The chance elements of childhood and social experiences that can come to produce psychotic assassins and deviates of all manner would be eliminated and most men would become altruistic and pleasant to one another. Would that such a world could be!

The thesis of this book is that uncertainties and variations in personal experience sometimes produce deviates but also produce ingenious and creative individuals. Unique and innovative minds grow among those who can come to perceive differences between others and themselves, and who continue to hold the assumption that they are free agents, the makers of their own fates.

This book will focus upon research that has been conducted in psychological laboratories and in field settings concerning the effects of an individual’s perception of control. Whether people, or other species for that matter, believe that they can determine their own fates, within limits, will be seen to be of critical importance to the way in which they cope with stress and engage in challenges. In other words, what Skinner believes to be an irrelevant illusion will be shown to be a very relevant illusion, one that seems to be central to man’s ability to survive and to enjoy life.

The position presented in this book is not offered with the enthusiasm engendered by confident rebuttal and refutation. Skinner’s wish for a more orderly and mannerly world is shared by many if not most individuals. It is paradoxical, however, that the very surrender of the belief in free will advocated by Skinner as a step in the direction of a less violent world can be viewed as a source of increased violence, especially that of prosocial kind. Although the data and arguments presented in this book are generally counter to Skinner’s position regarding the myth of individual freedom, they are presented with an awareness that the maintenance of the belief in individual freedom is not without considerable cost.

Man must come to be more effective and more able to perceive himself as the determiner of his fate if he is to live comfortably with himself. It is through the very abnegation of self-direction and the surrender to indomitable forces that man commits horrendous acts upon dissimilar others. On the other hand, as we encourage individualism and privacy, we generate more loneliness, discontent, and personal misery among the less advantaged and beget more antisocial criminality. Ecologists have made us aware that whichever way man turns he creates disorder, if not of one sort then of another.

EMPIRICAL DEMONSTRATIONS OF THE CONCEPT

A series of psychological experiments that have immediate relevance to urban malaise will serve to introduce the concept of perceived control. David Glass, Jerome E. Singer, and their colleagues (Glass, Reim, & Singer, 1971; Glass & Singer, 1972; Glass, Singer, & Friedman, 1969; Reim, Glass, & Singer, 1971) conducted a series of investigations concerned with the effects of noise on tasks requiring persistence and attention to details. In several of these experiments, subjects had to complete a set of simple tasks: number comparisons, addition, and letter finding. In the number comparisons task, subjects were asked to indicate whether the multidigit numbers in each set of a series of pairs were the same or different. The addition task simply required subjects to add sets of one- and two-digit numbers. The letter finding task required that subjects find the letter A in five words out of a column of 41 words. These tasks, simple enough in themselves, were administered under four conditions of noise distraction (Glass, Singer, & Friedman, 1969).

An aversive noise was created by combining the sounds of two people speaking Spanish and one person speaking Armenian simultaneous with the sounds of a mimeograph machine, a desk calculator, and a typewriter, all producing a composite, nondistinguishable roar. No doubt the roar was a good replica of general urban mayhem. The authors, all New York residents, were quite experienced with such stimuli. However, it was not simply noise and its impact upon persons working at simple tasks that was of interest. Rather, the concern was with the effects of the predictability and controllability of the noise. In this study, each of four groups received a different combination of stimuli. One group was subjected to a loud noise (110 db) for 9 seconds at the end of every minute of the session. Another group received the loud noise but at random intervals and for random lengths of time. Two other groups received fixed and random noises, but at a softer volume (56 db).

As might have been expected, the initial bursts of noise were effective in distracting most subjects. However, as the session progressed, subjects adapted to the noise, improving in performance on the simple tasks, and exhibiting lesser responsivity to the noise as assessed by physiological measurements. After the session, subjects were engaged in two further tasks during which there was noise or similar interference. One task was designed to evoke frustration. The second task, although routine, required caution and attentiveness.

The frustration task consisted of design copying. Subjects had to trace all the lines in each of four designs with certain restrictions: Subjects were not to lift the pencil from the paper at any time and were not to trace any line twice. Several copies of each design were available so that a subject could make as many attempts to succeed as he desired. Two of the diagrams were insoluble. Therefore, no matter how many times the subject attempted them, he failed.

The dependent variable measured in this task was the number of times that subjects attempted to solve the insoluble designs. Subjects who had received noise at fixed intervals did not differ from a control group that had not been subjected to noise at all. Those subjects who had suffered the noise on a random schedule made considerably fewer attempts, and this was most pronounced when the random noise had been of the higher intensity.

The second task was a proofreading job. Ten errors were included on each of seven pages of an essay. Misspellings, grammatical errors, etc. were to be located during a 15-minute period. Performance on the proofreading task was measured in terms of the percentage of omitted errors. The results were somewhat less significant than for the tracing task, but subjects who experienced random noise made more omissions than those who received fixed interval noise. Loud, random noise was associated with the highest percentage of omitted errors, whereas the softer fixed interval noise was associated with the best proofreading performance.

Although the intensity of noise had some effect on the subjects’ performances, it paled in comparison to the effects of predictability. The implications of these results regarding predictability deserve close attention. If noise, or any aversive stimulus for that matter, is unanticipated, the shock value of the stimulus is augmented. Who has not found himself startled by soft but unexplainable sounds occurring in the night? The state of alertness and arousal thus engendered in the individual would probably be continuous if one were in a strange place where the meaning of noises and inferences to be drawn from them were uncertain. In other words, if we do not know the significance of a noise, it will become arousing; the perceiver will feel a need to become alert and ready for anything. The limits of anticipation and apprehensiveness depend upon the perceiver’s imagination.

What is the relationship between the meaning of a noise and the predictability of that noise? If we recognize a sound, such as the starting of a furnace motor, we know from where it originates and what consequences may be expected from it. The sequence is predictable; nothing untoward is anticipated. The sound will not change in pitch or intensity. If unusual changes do occur we become suspicious. In the case of the furnace, we would summon a repairman. In short, predictability is a major facet of knowing something. The consistency and reliability of noise in the investigation described above instructs the subject that subsequent changes in volume and timing of the noise are unlikely; there need be little apprehension about a sudden increased intensity. As regularity is perceived, the subject can also ready himself, slowing down in his work efforts when he anticipates the onset of noise. He can, therefore, avoid interruptions by not letting himself be caught unaware and thus be distracted in the midst of an activity.

Implicit in this discussion of predictability is the element of control. If we know the ordinary sounds of the furnace, then we know what must be done to it and when. If another person is predictable, then we have a good idea of how one must act with him to cause certain effects. In being forced to hear predictable noise, we may stop work and wait until it ceases, or steel ourselves for the onset, minimizing our own responses to the noise. It is this perception of the ability to “do something” that gives rise to the concept of perceived control.

In a second investigation reported by Glass et al. (1969), the effect of perceived control was more directly examined. All of the subjects received loud, randomly occurring noise, the most aversive and debilitating condition found in the first study. The major difference between the first and second studies was that, in the second investigation, half of the subjects were provided with a button that would enable them to terminate the noise. These subjects were instructed as to the use of the button, but were encouraged to use it only if the noise became too much for them to bear. In essence, the subjects were provided with a modern analog of control—the off switch.

Subjects with access to the off switch tried almost five times the number of insoluble puzzles and made significantly fewer omissions in proofreading than did their counterparts who were given no such option for controlling the aversive stimulation. These differences were obtained despite the fact that none of the subjects who had potential control actually used it. The mere knowledge that one can exert control, then, serves to mitigate the debilitating effects of aversive stimuli.

From the investigations reported by Glass et al. (1969) it may be concluded that when an aversive event is predictable, its effects are minimized. This may result from the opportunity that regularity creates for us either to schedule our efforts so as to avoid interruption, or to prepare our sensory apparatus so as to be less sensitive to the disturbing event. In addition, control of the termination of the aversive stimulus diminishes the impact of that stimulus, perhaps, by eliminating the fear that “things can get worse” and even beyond endurance. Conceivably it is fear of unendurable pain that is debilitating to the cognitive processes of individuals undergoing the experience of unpredictable and uncontrollable but only mild to moderate levels of pain and irritation.

Extrapolation from these conjectures regarding fear of pain to the suffering of anxiety may provide an explanation of well-known clinical phenomena. Would an individual experience anxiety if he had ways of avoiding events that threatened him? Perhaps, “la belle indifference,” the beautiful indifference of hysterical women toward their functional disabilities during the Victorian era, was derived from a sense of inner content. Conversion reactions, through which neurologically impossible paralyses occur, often created “secondary gains” for patients in that they would be allowed to avoid “aversive experiences” such as sexual intercourse. It is tempting to suggest that, for many hysterical patients who frequented psychoanalysts’ offices during the first decades of this century, hysterical symptoms were an “off switch,” a device by which it became possible to terminate threatening events. Similarly, therapy as it is practiced today often seems directed toward helping a patient find a better “off switch,” one that enables him to more comfortably approach and cope with threats.

Such conjecture would seem premature if it were not for the reliability and consistency of research on perceived control. Glass, Reim, and Singer (1971) were able to replicate the “access to a button” phenomenon described above when subjects themselves were not in direct control, but could ask a partner to press the button and terminate the noise for them. With shock as the aversive stimulus, Staub, Tursky, and Schwartz (1971) found that subjects who were allowed to administer shock to themselves and to select the level of intensity of that shock reported less discomfort at higher levels of shock and endured stronger shocks than did paired subjects to whom shocks were administered passively. However, when all subjects were given a second series of shock trials administered without subject control, the group that previously experienced control declined in their tolerance for the shocks, rated lower intensity levels as being more uncomfortable, and endured less shock than previously. On the other hand, no changes were found among subjects who had not experienced control.

The Glass and Singer experiments exhibit the effects of control on task performance under aversive conditions. The investigation by Staub et al. (1971) reveals similar shifts in self-reports in that the reported aversive quality of a stimulus decreased when subjects exercised control over that stimulus. These results are congruent with findings reported by Pervin (1963) that subjects preferred predictable, self-controlled conditions. Parallel findings with regard to acknowledged anxiety in each condition were obtained. Other investigations (Corah & Boffa, 1970; Haggard, 1943) have found that stress, as measured by physiological changes, was reduced when subjects were able to control the onset and termination of aversive stimulation.

Yet further support for the assumed importance of perceived control in predicting responses to aversive stimuli can be found in a number of reported studies. Glass, Singer, Leonard, Krantz, Cohen, and Cummings (1973), for instance, found that both the subjective ratings of the painfulness of electric shocks, and the aftereffects of those shocks, diminished when subjects believed that their behavior could effectively reduce shock duration. Glass, and his colleagues then, have been able to demonstrate generality of their results across types of aversive stimuli (noise and shock) and types of aftereffect tasks (maze tracing, proofreading, and Stroop test performance). On the other hand, autonomic responses were not affected by the perceived control manipulations.

Other investigators (Bowers, 1968; Houston, 1972) have reported similar findings: that physiological states monitored during experiments in which electric shocks have been administered have not varied with differences in perceived control. At the same time, however, these investigators have found that reported tolerance of shock levels and statements of anxiety shifted in the anticipated directions with controllability. Golin (1974) has likewise reported that uncontrollable shock has more deleterious effects upon complex learning task performances than controllable shock, though this was most particularly so among highly anxious individuals. On the other hand, when controllability of the shocks was emphasized, the predicted ameliorative effects upon performance were also found, but largely among the less anxious individuals. Only in two studies thus far, (Geer, Davison, & Gatchel, 1970; Hokanson, DeGood, Forrest, & Brittain, 1971) have physiological responses b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Preface to the First Edition
• 1. Locus of Control: Understanding the Concept
• 2. The Perception of Control as an Enduring Attitude
• 3. Social Learning Theory: A Systematic Approach to the Study of Perceived Control
• 4. Locus of Control and the Resistance to Influence
• 5. Locus of Control and Cognitive Activity
• 6. Locus of Control and Achievement-Related Behavior
• 7. Locus of Control and Coping Behavior
• 8. Fatalism and Psychopathology
• 9. The Social Antecedents of Locus of Control
• 10. Changes in the Locus of Control
• 11. The Assessment of Locus of Control
• 12. Implications of Research
• Appendices
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index