IB Psychology HLTopic 7 — MotivationHuman RelationshipsCore concept~9 min read
Locus of Control and How People Act
Everyone in the room says the wrong answer out loud. Do you say it too? Locus of control is psychology’s best-known attempt to explain why some people hold their ground and others do not. It is a genuinely useful idea — and, as you will see, a very slippery one to measure.
📘 What you need to know
Locus of control (LOC) is how much a person believes their own actions decide what happens to them. Rotter designed a scale to measure it in 1966.
High internal LOC: I am responsible for my outcomes. Tends to go with confidence and holding to your own standards.
High external LOC: other people, luck and circumstances decide. Tends to go with a stronger need for approval.
High internal LOC is linked to resisting conformity and obedience, because the person is following standards they set themselves.
Asch (1951) found around 26% of participants never conformed on any trial — but he did not measure their LOC.
LOC is measured by self-report, so it carries social desirability, response bias and cultural bias problems.
The idea in one sentence
Locus of control
Where do I believe the cause of what happens to me is located — inside me, or outside me?
“Locus” just means place. So LOC asks where you put the cause. Fail a test: was it my revision, or the teacher? Get the job: was it my preparation, or luck? Nobody sits at a pure extreme. LOC is a scale, and people move along it depending on the situation — most of us are internal about things we are good at and external about things we are not.
Draw this line in a plan before writing an LOC answer. It stops you writing about “internals” and “externals” as if they were two species.
Why LOC turns up in questions about conformity
Think about what conforming actually requires. You have to treat the group’s opinion as more reliable than your own judgement, or you have to care enough about their approval to say something you do not believe.
Someone with a high internal LOC is poorly set up for both. They hold themselves to standards they chose, and they are less dependent on approval, so the pull of the group has less to work with. Someone with a high external LOC already believes outside forces determine outcomes — going along with the room fits that belief rather than contradicting it.
Connect it to motivation: internal LOC pairs naturally with intrinsic motivation. Both are about the reason for acting sitting inside the person. External LOC pairs with extrinsic motivation for the same reason. Saying this explicitly links Topic 7.1 to 7.4 and shows the examiner you can see the topic as a whole.
The evidence, and what it does not show
Asch’s conformity work is the study everyone reaches for. In his line-judgement task, around a quarter of participants — about 26% — never conformed on a single trial. That is real evidence that some people resist normative pressure even when everyone around them agrees.
This is the trap in LOC essays: the resistance is measured, the explanation is assumed. Point that out and you are evaluating properly.
Look carefully at what has been shown. Asch measured whether people conformed. He did not measure their locus of control, so we cannot say the resisters had high internal LOC. They might have. They might also have worked out what the study was really about, or simply trusted their eyes, or not cared what strangers thought of them. Any of those would produce the same behaviour.
This is the highest-value paragraph you can write about LOC: the behaviour is observable, the cause is inferred, and the inference has never been directly tested in the classic studies. Get that down clearly and you are arguing, not just describing.
Why LOC is hard to measure
It relies on self-report. A questionnaire asks you to describe your own beliefs about causation, which is a hard thing to report accurately.
Social desirability bias. Saying “I take responsibility for my life” is the answer that sounds better, so scores drift towards internal.
Response and acquiescence bias. Some people agree with statements as a habit, which distorts a scale built from agree or disagree items.
It is not stable across situations. A single score treats a shifting tendency as a fixed trait.
Culture bias. Scales built in individualistic cultures treat internal LOC as healthy. In collectivistic cultures, seeing outcomes as shared with family or community is normal, not a deficit.
Worked example
WORKED EXAMPLE
To what extent is locus of control key to understanding resistance to social influence? [15 marks]
Plan first, then one fully written paragraph so you can see the level of argument needed.
Plan
1 Define LOC and resistance. 2 FOR: internal LOC gives a reason to hold your own standards; Asch shows a resisting minority exists. 3 AGAINST: LOC was never measured in those studies; situational factors do more work. 4 Measurement problems. 5 Culture. 6 Judgement.
Written paragraph — the case against
The strongest objection is that resistance is better predicted by the situation than by the person. In Asch’s variations, adding a single ally who disagreed with the majority cut conformity sharply, and that change happened without anyone’s locus of control altering. If a small change to the room produces a large change in behaviour, then personality is not doing most of the explaining. LOC may set a baseline tendency, but it is the situation that decides what happens on the day.
Judgement to close on
LOC is a useful part of the explanation and a poor whole explanation: it describes a tendency that is hard to measure, was never recorded in the classic studies, and is easily overridden by situational factors.
Both sides, evidence, clear judgementUse sources if the paper gives them. Markers check that the sources were actually used, not just mentioned.
💡 Exam tip
Name Rotter (1966) for the scale. One correct name, used once, is enough.
Always say LOC is a tendency on a continuum. It protects you from over-claiming later in the essay.
The “Asch never measured LOC” point is worth planning into every LOC essay.
Bring in culture bias — internal LOC is not universally admired, and that is a real limitation of the construct.
Link internal LOC to intrinsic motivation to keep the answer inside the motivation topic.
⚠ Common mix-up
Treating LOC as a diagnosis. It is a self-report tendency, not a category people belong to.
Claiming Asch’s resisters had internal LOC. Never measured. Say “may have”, or lose the mark.
Confusing LOC with self-efficacy. LOC is about who causes outcomes; self-efficacy is about whether you can do a specific task.
Assuming internal LOC is always better. Taking full blame for events outside your control is not healthy either.
Describing conformity studies at length. The question is about LOC. Use Asch as evidence, not as the subject.
Up next: What Motivates People at Work — who employees actually want praise from, and why survey data about motivation at work is harder to interpret than it looks.
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