FateThis article is about the research done by Julian Rotter who explored the differences in how people view the consequences of their behavior, categorizing those who believe that their actions directly lead to the consequences as having an internal locus of control and those that believe that consequences are the result of the workings of fate as having an external locus of control. This phenomenon was tested using questionnaires with sets of two statements - one pertaining to internal and the other to external loci of control - where the participants were asked to choose the statement that they agreed with the most in order to determine where on the sliding scale of internal or exter ...view middle of the document...
While it is obviously not a particular ethnic culture, they do share a similar love for sports and competition, which has bred superstitious behavior in all different sports.The method used to test this study of internals and externals was effective. The filler questions used in order to make sure that the participants could not guess what the survey was testing helped to make the test effective. It would be interesting to see the test altered a little with the questions followed by a scale from 1 to 5, asking the participants how strongly they agree with each statement. The test used by Rotter had the participants chose one statement or the other. It is possible that they were unsure or neutral on certain issues, but were forced to pick one statement anyway. Most people, I do not think, are one or the other, but a mixture of both internal and external. Another way to study this phenomenon could be to look at statistics among socioeconomic and cultural groups to look for similar behavior with gambling, smoking, political activism, etc. If it were possible, looking at statistics of ch...
