People differ stably in whether they attribute outcomes to their own action or to outside forces.
Rotter's 1966 scale. The correlations with health, achievement and persistence are robust, and the causal direction is not — belief in control and actual control tend to travel together.
In practice
- An employee who attributes outcomes to their own action asks for feedback; one who attributes them outside does not, and the gap widens.
- Two patients with identical prognoses adhere to treatment at different rates, and the belief and the outcome travel together.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Theories of the mind, from the lab to the bookshop