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Believing you steer your life helps
What locus of control is
Clinical psychologists measure this with locus of control tests, which gauge how far you believe you are in charge of your own life and can handle the bumps that hit you. An internal locus of control means you do. An external locus means you feel like a victim of circumstances, with bad things happening that you can't control. Most people sit somewhere in the middle.
Those who lean internal, even unrealistically so, are much more likely to take active measures to solve problems as they arise. Internal locus of control is the same thing as agency.
The shift over decades
Beginning in the 1960s, school-aged children, especially in the middle school to high school range, were given standardized locus of control questionnaires. Over the years the scores shifted greatly toward external, which means agency has been declining across the same decades in which children lost opportunities to play independently of adults.
Agency is present from the start: a one-year-old takes charge of their own activity and explores the surroundings all the time.
How do psychologists measure locus of control?
Julian Rotter published the Internal-External Locus of Control Scale in 1966. It presents pairs of statements, and the person picks the one closer to their own belief, such as whether success comes mainly from effort or mainly from luck. The score shows how far someone leans toward an internal or external view. Rotter developed the idea within social learning theory.
Have locus of control scores really shifted?
In 2004, Jean Twenge, Liqing Zhang, and Charles Im published a meta-analysis of locus of control scores among American college students and children. It covered studies from 1960 to 2002. Scores moved steadily toward the external end over those decades.
How did learned helplessness research begin?
In 1967, Martin Seligman and Steven Maier found that dogs given shocks they could not escape later failed to escape shocks they could have avoided. For decades, researchers read this as the animals learning to be helpless. In a 2016 review, Maier and Seligman concluded that passivity is the brain's default response to prolonged adversity, and that learning one has control is what changes the response.
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