At any given moment, you may feel as though your ability to
succeed in the world involves some combination of your own efforts and factors
that are out of your control. Starting
about 50 years ago, psychologists began to explore the relationship between people’s
beliefs about the amount of control that they have in a situation and their
behavior.
This work suggests that people who believe that their
efforts drive success in situations tend to work harder and to do more positive
and healthy things than people who believe that factors outside their control
are affecting outcomes. Essentially,
when you believe that your own actions matter, then you work to create the
outcomes you desire. When you believe
that your actions will not have much of an impact on the future, then you do
not put in much effort.
A key concept in this work is locus of control. People
with an internal locus of control believe that they are the authors of their
destiny. People with an external locus
of control believe that circumstances control their future. Much of the work on this idea has focused on
locus of control as a personality trait that is relatively stable over time.
An open question is whether there are variations within
individuals in locus of control that also affect the way they act. This question was addressed in a paper by
Holly Ryon and Marci Gleason in the January, 2014 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
They had a sample of pregnant couples fill out a daily
survey for three weeks. The women were
in their last trimester of pregnancy.
Their non-pregnant partner also participated. Pregnant couples were used (in part), because
they are likely to experience a lot of stress and changes in health on a daily
basis. Most people’s lives are a little
less adventurous than those of pregnant couples as they approach their due
date.
Each day, they filled out a number of scales. One measured
locus of control (with questions like “Today I was able to deal with my
problems” and “I feel that I have control over the things that happen to
me.”). They also filled out measures of
anxiety and depression. They reported
whether they exercised and ate a healthy diet and also any negative health
symptoms they experienced. They also
reported the hassles they experienced that day (including health problems, car
problems, financial problems, and issues with their partner).
One set of analyses demonstrated that the daily hassles
people experience affect people’s perceived locus of control. The more hassles, the more that they felt
that circumstances controlled their lives.
The anxiety they experienced that day also affected their locus of
control.
Daily differences in locus of control then predicted behavior
and symptoms. For both the pregnant
partner and the non-pregnant partner, the more they believed that their actions
controlled the future, the more that they engaged in healthy behaviors like
eating well and exercising and the fewer negative symptoms they experienced.
This work extends previous studies by demonstrating that
even day-to-day changes in your beliefs about your own effectiveness in the
world influence your behavior. On those
days when you feel like you are in control, you act in healthier and more
proactive ways than when you believe that the world is controlling you. When you feel like you have no control, it
can be valuable to engage with other people and let them help to motivate you
to act in healthy and productive ways.
