Who’s in charge of what happens to you?

This questionnaire is adapted for college students from Julian Rotter’s Internal–External Locus of Control Scale (1966), one of the most widely used measures in personality psychology.

• 29 pairs of statements. For each pair, pick the one you believe more. You have to choose one, even if you agree with both or neither.
• Answer for yourself. Go with what you actually believe, not what sounds like the “right” answer. There are no right answers.
• About 5 to 7 minutes. Go with your first reaction.
• Completely private. Everything runs in your browser. Your answers are not saved or sent anywhere, and closing the tab erases them.

Which statement do you agree with more?

Keyboard: press A or B to choose, and the left arrow key to go back.

Your results

You chose the external statement on

Six of the 29 pairs were filler items that aren’t scored. They’re there, as in Rotter’s original, so the purpose of the scale is less obvious. Scores run from 0 (most internal) to 23 (most external).

How you compare nationally

The best national benchmark comes from a meta-analysis by Twenge, Zhang, and Im (2004), which pooled 97 samples of US college students (more than 18,000 people) who took Rotter’s scale between 1960 and 2002. The average score rose from about 8.7 in 1960 to about 12.0 in 2002, a shift of roughly 0.8 standard deviations toward the external end.

How these percentages are estimated: they assume scores are roughly normally distributed with a standard deviation of about 4 points, which is consistent with the published data. Because this version uses wording adapted for today’s students, treat the comparisons as approximate rather than exact.

Where your beliefs about control show up

Rotter designed the scale to measure one general expectancy, but later researchers found that people often feel differently about control in different parts of life. In particular, many people feel in charge of their own grades and relationships while feeling that politics and big institutions are out of reach. Here is how your answers split across the topics the items covered.

The bar shows the share of items in each area where you chose the external statement. These groupings are for discussion only; they are too short to be reliable subscales.

What locus of control means

Locus of control is a generalized expectancy: your learned belief about whether outcomes in your life depend on your own behavior (internal) or on luck, fate, timing, or powerful others (external). Rotter developed the idea within social learning theory, which holds that we act based on what we expect our actions to produce. If you don’t expect effort to pay off, you have less reason to make the effort.

What the research tends to find

Compared with more external people, people with a more internal locus of control tend, on average, to earn somewhat higher grades, report greater job satisfaction and well-being, seek out information about their situation, and cope more actively with stress. A more external locus is linked, modestly, with higher rates of depression and anxiety and with feelings of helplessness. These are correlations. They don’t show that internality causes good outcomes; success can also make people more internal.

Neither end is simply “better”

A very internal outlook can turn into self-blame when something truly wasn’t your fault, such as a layoff during a recession or unfair treatment. A more external outlook can be an accurate reading of real constraints: money, discrimination, family obligations, or a job market that doesn’t reward effort evenly. Many psychologists argue the healthiest position is a realistic one: taking ownership of what you can influence while recognizing what you can’t.

Culture and history

Locus of control isn’t only an individual trait. Twenge and colleagues found that young Americans as a whole became steadily more external over four decades, and they linked the trend to rising alienation, cynicism about institutions, and a growing tendency to explain misfortune as someone else’s doing. Your score partly reflects the era you grew up in.

Culture matters too. The scale was built and validated in the United States, an individualist culture that emphasizes personal choice. In a study of more than 9,000 employees in 43 countries, Smith, Trompenaars, and Dugan (1995) found that response patterns lined up with the individualism–collectivism distinction and with differing views about the role of luck and chance. In more collectivist cultures, attributing outcomes to family, group, or circumstance can reflect a different view of the self rather than a sense of helplessness. Trends also differ across countries: a 2023 meta-analysis of Chinese college students found no shift toward externality between 2001 and 2019, unlike the US pattern (Wang & Xin, 2023).

Your answers

For class discussion

1. Which pair was hardest for you to choose between? What made it hard?
2. Find a pair where you think the “external” statement is actually more accurate for many students. What does that suggest about calling one end of the scale healthier?
3. US college students became more external from 1960 to 2002. What social changes might explain that? Would you predict that students in 2026 score higher or lower than in 2002, and why?
4. How might your locus of control show up in how you study for this course, or in how you explain a disappointing exam grade? Connect this to attribution theory or learned helplessness.
5. This scale forces you to pick one statement. What are the advantages of a forced-choice format, and what might it miss?
6. Does a scale built in the US in the 1960s measure the same thing for students from different cultural backgrounds today? How could a researcher find out?

References

• Benassi, V. A., Sweeney, P. D., & Dufour, C. L. (1988). Is there a relation between locus of control orientation and depression? Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 97, 357–367.
• Findley, M. J., & Cooper, H. M. (1983). Locus of control and academic achievement: A literature review. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 419–427.
• Ng, T. W. H., Sorensen, K. L., & Eby, L. T. (2006). Locus of control at work: A meta-analysis. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 27, 1057–1087.
• Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1–28.
• Smith, P. B., Trompenaars, F., & Dugan, S. (1995). The Rotter locus of control scale in 43 countries: A test of cultural relativity. International Journal of Psychology, 30(3), 377–400.
• Twenge, J. M., Zhang, L., & Im, C. (2004). It’s beyond my control: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of increasing externality in locus of control, 1960–2002. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(3), 308–319.
• Wang, X., & Xin, Z. (2023). Cross-temporal meta-analyses of changes in the locus of control among Chinese college students: No changes were also a trend. Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology, 17.

Item wording on this page is an adaptation for college students that follows the structure and scoring logic of Rotter’s scale (23 scored forced-choice pairs plus 6 fillers). It is intended for classroom demonstration, not for research or clinical use.