Biography Rotter

The internal and external -external lining of control most of the studies that were carried out in accordance with the theory of Rotter was focused on a personal variable called the control locus. Being a central construct of the theory of social learning, the monitoring locus is a generalized expectation of the extent to which people control reinforcements in their lives.

People with an external locus of control believe that their successes and failures are regulated by external factors, such as fate, luck, happy case, influential people and unpredictable environment forces. Externs believe that they are hostages of fate. People with an internal locus of control believe that good luck and failures are determined by their own actions and abilities of internal, or personal factors.

Internals therefore feel that they are more affected by reinforcements than people with an external orientation of the control locus. The measurement of the Lokus of the control “scale I-E”, created by Rotter, consists of 23 pairs of allegations of forced choice, with six additional issues in order to disguise the goals of this test. For each answer indicating an external orientation, the subject received one score, and so on for all 23 pairs.

The results are ranked from zero to 23, and the highest result reflects high externality. Researchers using the I-E scale usually determined the subjects whose results were beyond the extreme boundaries of distribution, for example, in addition to 75 or below 25 percentiles. These subjects were classified either as externs or as internals, and those whose results occupied an intermediate position were excluded from further research.

The characteristics of the external studies and interns of research based on the I-E scale show that externalities and interns are different not only in their conviction, regarding where the source of control of their behavior is located. One of the key differences that distinguish externalities from interns is the ways that they are looking for information about the environment. In several studies, it was shown that: interns are more likely than externalities, will actively look for information about possible health problems.

Interneals not only resist unauthorized exposure, but also, when the opportunity seems to be able to control the behavior of others. Also, the interns usually like people with whom they can manipulate, and do not like those on whom they cannot affect the accent of Rotter on the importance of social and cognitive factors in explaining human learning expands the boundaries of traditional behaviorism.

His theory proceeds from the fact that the most important aspects of the personality are known within the framework of the social context. Rotter's theory also complements the theory of Bandura, emphasizing the mutual interaction of a person and his environment. Both theorists reject the skinner point of view that people passively respond to external reinforcements. And finally, Rotter's theory offers an economical and consistent structure to organize what is known about human behavior.

Focused on the limited number of well -defined concepts and principles of personality functioning, his ideas will undoubtedly contribute to the development of personology. On the other hand, with the exception of the study of the control locus, Rotter's theory did not give any empirical studies that it deserves well.