Locus of control is a theory in personality psychology referring to the extent to which individuals believe that they can control

events that affect them. Understanding of the concept was developed byJulian B. Rotter in 1954, and has since become an aspect of personality studies. A person's locus (Latin for "place" or "location") can be either internal (meaning the person believes that they control their life) or external (meaning they believe that their environment, some higher power or other people control their decisions and their life). Individuals with a high internal locus of control believe that events result primarily from their own behavior and actions; for example, if a person with an internal locus of control does not perform as well as they wanted to on a test, they would blame it on lack of preparedness on their part. If they performed well on a [1] test, they would think that it was because they studied enough. Those with a high external locus of control believe that powerful others, fate or chance primarily determine events. In the test-performance example, if a person with a high external locus of control does poorly on a test, they would blame the test questions as too difficult. If they performed well on a test, they would think the teacher was lenient or they [1] were lucky. Those with a high internal locus of control have better control of their behavior, tend to be more politically [citation needed] involved and are more likely to attempt to influence other people than those with a high [citation needed] external (or low internal) locus of control. They also assign greater likelihood to their efforts [citation needed] being successful, and more actively seek information concerning their situation. Locus of control has generated much research in a variety of areas in psychology. The construct is applicable to fields such as educational psychology, health psychology or clinical psychology. There will probably continue to be debate about whether specific or more global measures of locus of control will prove to be more useful. Careful distinctions should also be made between locus of control (a concept linked with expectancies about the future) and attributional style (a concept linked with explanations for past outcomes), or between locus of control and concepts such as self-efficacy. The importance of locus of control as a topic in psychology is likely to remain quite central for many years. Locus of control has also been included as one of the four dimensions that comprise core selfevaluations, one's fundamental appraisal of oneself, along with neuroticism, self-efficacy, and self[2] esteem. The concept of core self-evaluations was first examined by Judge, Locke, and Durham [2] (1997), and since has proven to have the ability to predict several work outcomes, specifically, job satisfaction and job performance

Personality orientation
Rotter (1975) cautioned that internality and externality represent two ends of a continuum, not an either/or typology. Internals tend to attribute outcomes of events to their own control. Externals attribute outcomes of events to external circumstances. It should not be thought, however, that internality is linked exclusively with attribution to effort and externality with attribution to luck (as Weiner's work see belowmakes clear). This has obvious implications for differences between internals and externals in terms of their achievement motivation, suggesting that internal locus is linked with higher levels of need for achievement. Due to their locating control outside themselves, externals tend to feel they have less

control over their fate. People with an external locus of control tend to be more stressed and prone [9] to clinical depression. Internals were believed by Rotter (1966) to exhibit two essential characteristics: high achievement motivation and low outer-directedness. This was the basis of the locus-of-control scale proposed by Rotter in 1966, although it was based on Rotter's belief that locus of control is a single construct. Since 1970, Rotter's assumption of uni-dimensionality has been challenged, with Levenson (for example) arguing that different dimensions of locus of control (such as beliefs that events in one's life are selfdetermined, or organized by powerful others and are chance-based) must be separated. Weiner's early work in the 1970s suggested that orthogonal to the internality-externality dimension, differences should [10] be considered between those who attribute to stable and those who attribute to unstable causes. This meant that attributions could be to ability (an internal stable cause), effort (an internal unstable cause), task difficulty (an external stable cause) or luck (an external, unstable cause). This was how Weiner first saw these four causes, although he has been challenged as to whether people see luck (for example) as an external cause, whether ability is always perceived as stable and whether effort is always seen as changing. Indeed, in more recent publications (e.g. Weiner, 1980) he uses different terms for these four causes (such as "objective task characteristics" instead of "task difficulty" and "chance" instead of "luck"). Psychologists since Weiner have distinguished between stable and unstable effort, knowing that in some circumstances effort could be seen as a stable cause (especially given the presence of words such as "industrious" in English).