Self-Determination and Attribution of Responsibility: Another Look

While evidence pertaining to an internal locus of control suggests the postulate of consistent attribution of responsibility to personal forces, that concerning the external orientation does not present a clear picture, and findings suggest the “external” orientation is more sensitive to environmental influences, especially under conditions of perceived threat. To investigate this further, two distinct groups of subjects, external and internal scorers, were selected on the basis of scores on Rotter's I-E scale by an initial sample of 350 Rhodes University undergraduates. The 163 selected subjects were randomly assigned to success and failure conditions on a problem-task. The prediction that the externally-oriented subjects would show a significantly greater tendency than the internal scorers to blame “bad luck” for their failure was supported as was the expectation of no difference between the two orientations under conditions without threat. It is suggested that Rotter's locus-of-control construct must be viewed as interactional rather than unidimensional.