PSYCH 111 Chapter Notes - Chapter VII: Externals, Environmental Noise, Externality
Document Summary
Are you the master of your fate?, pp. Julian rotter, one of the most influential behaviorists in psychology"s history, proposed that individuals differ a great deal in terms of where they place the responsibility for what happens to them. When people interpret the consequences of their behavior to be controlled by luck, fate, or powerful others, this indicates a belief in what rotter called an external locus of control. Conversely, he maintained that if people interpret their own choices and personality as responsible for their behavioral consequences, they believe in an internal locus of control. In his 1966 article, rotter explained that a person"s tendency to view events from an internal, versus external, locus of control is fundamental to who we are and can be explained from a social learning theory perspective. As children develop, some will have frequent experiences in which their behavior directly influences consequences, while for others, reinforcement will appear to result from actions outside of themselves.
