Agency & Locus of Control

topic

Locus of control — Julian Rotter's construct describing the degree to which individuals believe outcomes are determined by their own behavior (internal locus) versus by external forces like luck, fate, or others' actions (external locus) — is consistently associated with psychological wellbeing, academic achievement, physical health behaviors, and resilience, with internal locus predicting the sense of personal agency that motivates the health behaviors and coping actions that produce better outcomes while external locus predicts the passive acceptance and helplessness that maintain adverse conditions.

Role

Locus of control is the resilience factor that most directly determines whether a person responds to adversity with action or resignation — making its development through the mastery experiences that build internal locus a fundamental resilience intervention. The specific pattern of learned helplessness (Seligman's foundational work on depression) — in which repeated exposure to uncontrollable outcomes produces the generalized belief that one cannot influence events — establishes external locus as the primary mechanism through which adversity produces lasting impairment rather than resilience, and the reversibility of learned helplessness through controllability experience establishes the development of internal locus as the intervention pathway.

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