Do You Feel in Control of Your Life?
Where you think the outcomes come from
When something good or bad happens to you, do you see your own choices behind it, or circumstances, luck and other people? Psychologists have measured this since the 1960s. It predicts how you handle setbacks, how much you persist, and, more surprisingly, how healthy you tend to be.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
There are no good and bad answers here. Both ends of this scale have real costs, and the honest answer is more useful than the flattering one.
What it measures
Two beliefs that can coexist: that your own effort and choices determine what happens to you, and that outcomes are largely set by luck, timing and people with more power than you.
Based on: Locus of control (Rotter, 1966; Levenson, 1981)
Possible results
Internal control
The belief that what you do determines what happens to you.
External control
The belief that luck, timing and other people set the outcome.
Common questions
Is internal always better?
On average it predicts better outcomes, but not at the extreme. Very high internal control combined with a situation you genuinely cannot change produces self-blame rather than progress, and it is a known route into burnout for people in caring and high-responsibility jobs.
Can this change?
Yes, and it moves with circumstances more than with effort. Locus of control shifts internal when people accumulate experiences of their actions working, and shifts external after prolonged situations where nothing they did made a difference. It is a record of your history as much as a trait.
What if both scores are high?
That is a realistic position rather than a contradiction: you believe your effort matters and that a lot of what happens is outside your control. People who hold both tend to persist where it counts and let go where it does not, which is the most practically useful combination on this page.
Sources
- Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs.
- Levenson, H. (1981). Differentiating among internality, powerful others, and chance. Research with the Locus of Control Construct.
- Judge, T. A., Erez, A., Bono, J. E., & Thoresen, C. J. (2002). Are measures of self-esteem, neuroticism, locus of control, and generalized self-efficacy indicators of a common core construct?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
An honest note An important caveat this test cannot capture: an external score is not automatically a distortion. For people facing real structural constraints, believing that outcomes are not fully in their hands is often simply accurate, and the psychological literature has been criticised for treating it as a deficit.
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