Is Your Life Driven by Choice or Chance?

Do we feel in control of our lives? Not as much as we once did.

Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

Key points

• An internal locus of control is related to a host of positive outcomes.
• Internality is more effective than externality, but research shows that we are becoming more external.
• There is significant potential fallout of our increasing externality.
• What can be done to increase the likelihood of internality in children?

In February 2024, students in my college seminar took a test measuring locus of control (LOC). LOC reflects how much we expect our own behavior to affect what happens to us—rather than luck, fate, chance, or powerful others. The more we believe that our behavior has something to do with our outcomes, the more “internal” we are. In contrast. the more we believe outside forces determine what happens to us the more “external” we are.

LOC is one of the most significant concepts in the history of personality psychology. Julian Rotter’s 1966 article introducing it to the psychological community has been cited over 43,000 times. In his LOC test, people are asked to choose between internal and an external alternatives. For example:

• 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.

Rotter’s test remains the most popular choice to assess LOC in adults. The most frequently used LOC test for children is the Nowicki Strickland Internal External Control Scale (CNSIE, 1973). It uses simpler language and a Yes/No format to respond to items like these:

1. Do you believe that most problems will solve themselves if you just don’t fool with them?
2. Do you believe that whether others like you depends on how you act?

Is it better to be internally or externally controlled?

LOC is valued so highly because of the abundance of evidence showing internality to be associated with more positive outcomes than externality in areas of our lives including academic and athletic achievement; business success ranging from sales to CEO performance; health outcomes in mental, physical, and spiritual areas; and satisfaction in personal and social activities (Choice or Chance, Nowicki 2016; Perceived Control, Reich & Infurna (Eds.), 2016),

Are we as internally controlled as we were in 1966?

We should be, but we’re not.

The scores of the students in my class were consistent with that conclusion. Their average LOC score of 12.86 was more external than the average of 8.10 found by Rotter in 1966. In fact, my students scored more externally than the prison inmates Rotter tested in 1966, who scored an average of 10.33. Even as early as the 1970s, Rotter noted with some alarm that scores were more external than they were in the 1960s. He called for “active steps to reverse this troubling trend” because he felt that if feelings of externality continued, “we may be heading for a society of dropouts—each person sitting back, watching the world go by.”

What are the implications of a trend toward externality?

Unfortunately, Rotter’s call to reverse externality seems to have gone unheeded, at least based on a meta-analysis of LOC scores of over 18,000 adults and 6,000 children obtained over three decades (Twenge, Zhang & Im 2002). That analysis found that the average adult score obtained three decades later was more external than 80% of Rotter’s reported sample. The same was true for children.

Not much has happened recently to suggest that the trend toward externality has been reversed. Recession, war, divisive politics, a rise in the use of technology, and a pandemic have combined to frighten, isolate, and perhaps make us feel more externally controlled. Recent studies, including my own, (e. g., Turnbull, Nowicki, Golding et al., 2024) suggest that, like my present-day students, young adults are more external than their same-age peers were in the past.

Why are we more external now?

How can we explain the trend toward greater externality found in the general population and especially in my students and other members of Generation Z? This is especially relevant because, compared to those from other generations, members of Gen Z have the highest reports of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and being unconnected, all of which are significantly related to externality.

One possibility is that greater externality may be a valid reflection of the way things are in the more complicated tech-driven world of 2024 than they were in earlier times.

Another, more disconcerting possibility is that people in general—and members of Gen Z (such as my students) in specific—could be underestimating the control available to them. We know that externality increases in response to disasters (e. g., Nguyen & Mitrou, 2024) but the danger is that victims might remain external even though they are no longer helpless. This is especially noteworthy because individuals who do return to their original internality cope better than those who remain inappropriately external.

Could it be that the pandemic experience has lulled us into a state of helplessness that is not appropriate, and that we should be acting more internally than we are? Keep in mind that LOC is not a genetic given but a learned way of looking at one’s world that can be changed at any time during our lifetime.

Why do we need to claim our appropriate internality?

We need our internality because to be able to accurately connect one’s actions with future outcomes has enormous payoff in a democracy; in fact, it may be seen as the basic requirement for democracies not only to survive, but to thrive. Being internal means taking responsibility for one’s actions, persisting longer, delaying rewards, gathering relevant information, and resisting coercion—a set of characteristics calculated to drive the engines of free enterprise and democracy and to prevent powerful others from taking over the lives of ordinary citizens.