Skill versus chance activity preference and locus of control.

Schneider, John

doi:10.1037/h0025910

Cited by 27 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…rela ted to overt death anxiety (212) . Other studies (123,192) provided results which were general ly consistent with theory.…”

Section: Conceptual-operational Coordination and Validation Of Measuressupporting

confidence: 80%

Theory and Techniques of Personality Measurement

Fiske¹,

Pearson²

1970

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

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This chapter is one of the intermittent series which has had "assess ment" in its title. The authors have dropped that term because of its impre cision and its connotations. Assessment has often been used to refer to the combining of measures, usually by human judgment, to predict a criterion. But personality measurement as a whole involves the combination or reduc tion of observations to obtain an index and is concerned with much more than the prediction of criteria. Additionally, the terms assessment and crite ria have an evaluative flavor; while adequacy of functioning is involved in much of personality, a science of personality must not be limited to norma tive considerations. Finally, assessment has the connotation of dealing with the whole person. It seems quite clear that we cannot have a science of the whole person, or even of substantial segments of personality, until we un derstand the components.Most concepts in the personality field are so broad and heterogeneous in their referents that when one concept is used to describe different persons, it is very doubtful that the identical attribute is applied to each. The task fac ing personality today is the identifi cation and delineation of attributes which can be uniformly applied to persons, the objects of this science, with the specifi c applications of each attribute differing only in quantity, not quality. Coordinate with that task is the work of developing operations for measur ing each of these attributes. Such procedures must be standardized so that the measurements can, in principle, be replicated for the same persons and, particularly critical in this area, so that the measurements are getting at the same attribute in the different persons measured, without any sizable per son-instrument interaction. This chapter is concerned with the extent to which these standards are being approximated in personality measurement today.A science develops by an interactive or cyclical process, observations leading to concepts, and concepts guiding the next set of observations. In personality, an infi nity of observations has been conceptualized in a variety of sets of terms with general statements about them. These literary or even

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“…rela ted to overt death anxiety (212) . Other studies (123,192) provided results which were general ly consistent with theory.…”

Section: Conceptual-operational Coordination and Validation Of Measuressupporting

confidence: 80%

Theory and Techniques of Personality Measurement

Fiske¹,

Pearson²

1970

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

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“…It has been suggested (Gold, 1966;Schneider, 1968) that internally oriented subjects would prefer skilled tasks which would confirm their control over reinforcements, whereas externally oriented subjects would prefer chance activities because they do not believe in their ability or performance. Gold (1966) found no relationship between I-E scores and choice of a skill or a chance task.…”

Section: The Correlational Studymentioning

confidence: 96%

Dimensions of the I-E Scale and their Relationship to Other Personality Measures

Zuckerman

Gerbasi

1977

Educational and Psychological Measurement

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The 46 alternatives in the original 23-item forced-choice format of the I-E scale were administered in a Likert agree-disagree format. The intercorrelations of the 46 alternatives were subjected to a principal components analysis. A varimax rotation of four factors yielded four subscales comparable to those reported by Collins (1974): Belief in a difficult world, a just world, a politically responsive world, and a predictable world. Subjects' responses were factor scored and correlated with five measures: Skill-chance task preference, an achievement test, a political efficacy test, the Mach V scale, and a Just World scale. The pattern of correlations suggested that the difficult world factor, and to a lesser extent the predictable world factor, are relatively general in that they related to most of the five scales. The political world factor related only to (a) political efficacy and (b) Mach V (among males only), and appeared to be more specific in nature. The correlation with the Mach-V suggested that external responses to I-E political items indicated suspiciousness and anomie as well as belief in external control. The just world factor related only to the Just World Scale among males, and appeared to be somewhat inconsistent with the concept of belief in internal/external control. The correlations of the four factors with the five scales added some new meaning to the factors and suggested some ways of improving the I-E scale.EDUCATIONAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL MEASUREMENT 1977, 37, 159-175. ROTTER (1966 developed the Internal-External Locus of Control scale (I-E scale) to measure individual differences in the generalized belief regarding control of individual destinies. The scale consists of 23 forced-choice items. Each of the items offers an internal and an extrnal alternative from which the respondent must choose. Two factor analyses of the scale by Rotter (1966) andFranklin (1963) failed to produce at Purdue University on June 15, 2015 epm.sagepub.com Downloaded from

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“…Whereas internals, compared with externals, have consistently been found to prefer and perform better on skill-determined tasks, externals have been shown to express a greater preference for chance tasks than do internals and even to prefer chance tasks to skill tasks (e.g., DuCette & Wolk, 1973;Kahle, 1980;Schneider, 1968Schneider, , 1972. Rotter and Mulry (1965) found that externals consult fortune-tellers and have their horoscopes read more often than do internals, and DuCette and Wolk (1973) found that externals showed a greater preference for an extrasensory perception task than did internals.…”

Section: Locus Of Control and Behavior In Chance Situationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changing the world and changing the self: A two-process model of perceived control.

Rothbaum

Weisz²,

Snyder³

1982

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

1,780

1,282

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There is extensive evidence that people strongly value and are reluctant to relinquish the perception of control. Yet, both helplessness and locus of control theorists interpret various "inward" behaviors (passivity, withdrawal, and submissiveness) as signs of relinquished perceived control. As evidence, they note that inward behavior frequently is accompanied by causal attributions to limited ability, chance, and powerful others-all attributions that suggest uncontrollability. In contrast, we claim,that these attributions and the behaviors to which they relate may often reflect a type of perceived control that is generally overlooked. People attempt to gain control not only by bringing the environment into line with their wishes (primary control) but also by bringing themselves into line with environmental forces (secondary control). Four manifestations of secondary control are considered: (a) Attributions to severely, limited ability can serve to enhance predictive control and to protect against disappointment. Passive and withdrawn behaviors reflect the attempt to inhibit unfulfillable expectations, (b) Attributions to chance can reflect illusory control, since people often construe chance as a personal characteristic akin to an ability ("luck"). Individuals who make attributions to chance may exhibit passivity and withdrawal in skill situations, reserving energy and emotional investment for situations that allow them to capitalize on their perceived strength-that is, being lucky, (c) Attributions to powerful others permit vicarious control when the individual identifies with these others. Submission to a powerful leader, a group, or a deity sometimes enables the individual to join in their power, (d) All of the preceding attributions may foster interpretive control, in which the individual seeks to understand and derive meaning from otherwise uncontrollable events in order to accept them. When perceived control is recognized in both its primary and secondary forms, a broad range of inward behaviors can be seen as efforts to sustain rather than relinquish the perception of control.Factor analytic studies with children (reviewed in Achenbach & Edelbrock, 1978) and systematic observations of adults (e.g., Beck, 1967;Marks, 1977) have identified a This article was funded in part by National Institute of Mental Health Grant 1-RO1-MH-34210-01.The authors are indebted to Camille Wortman for her unusually thorough review of a draft of this article. Her comments added depth and clarity to many of the Central points.Requests for reprints should be sent to Fred Rothbaum, Department of Child Study, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts 02155. set of interrelated problem behaviors including passivity, withdrawal, and submissiveness (hereafter referred to as inward behavior). The popularity of the learned helplessness model (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978;Seligman, 1975) is due largely to its lucid account of at least some of these seemingly maladaptive behaviors (especially passivity and withdrawal). Adherents o...

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Skill versus chance activity preference and locus of control.

Cited by 27 publications

References 16 publications

Theory and Techniques of Personality Measurement

Theory and Techniques of Personality Measurement

Dimensions of the I-E Scale and their Relationship to Other Personality Measures

Changing the world and changing the self: A two-process model of perceived control.

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