External locus of control and cognitive ability independently distinguish men in prison from community living non‐offending men

Abstract

Background The ability to cope with failure and subsequent feedback is crucial for prisoner rehabilitation. Impaired executive function in prisoners, high trait aggression and external locus of control can undermine the capacity to react to feedback in socially adaptive ways. Aim To investigate the relationships between aggression, locus of control, and attribution in an experimental task involving feedback about failure and success. Methods Two groups were compared: 1. Imprisoned men, 2. Community living men without a history of incarceration. Aggression, locus of control and reasoning ability were assessed by means of psychometric instruments. An experimental task building on cognitive ability and providing performance‐related feedback was carried out. Attributions of failure and success were measured using an ad hoc rating scale. Results Prisoners reported higher levels of aggression and generalised externality, but poorer reasoning ability than the comparison group. Aggression was associated with external locus of control. In the experimental task, the community group showed higher success rates; higher scores on the task were correlated with less external attribution of own performance. Higher external locus of control and lower reasoning ability were independently associated with being a prisoner in a logistic regression model. Conclusions and Implications Men in prison were characterised by greater social and fatalistic externality paired with lower reasoning ability than never incarcerated community men. In‐prison rehabilitation strategies should pay early attention to improving reasoning ability and enabling men to recognise likely overuse of externally attributing their difficulties to fate, then helping them to become more realistic in their attributions and make use of realistic feedback.

Influence of medical humanization on patients’ attribution in negative medical situations with communication as the mediator: a questionnaire study

“…The former is called internal attribution and the latter is called external attribution ( 10–12 ). Fontao and Ross ( 13 , 14 ) found that external attributional biases was associated to aggressive behaviors. The overuse of external attribution brought about higher levels of aggression.…”