Locus of Control
The Basic Idea
Most people would say they enjoy the feeling that comes with a job well done. Of course, however, we define “well” relative to our self-constructs and the feasibility of the task at hand. Part of this positive feeling is due to the fact that we’ll attribute our successes to our hard work and efforts. But what about when we don’t perform as well as we wanted or expected? Are those “failures” a result of our own doings, or other influences?
Our locus of control - the degree to which we see outcomes as related to our personal influence versus external factors - tends to vary based on the outcome of an event.1 When we hold an internal locus of control, we attribute the outcome to our own efforts and abilities. When we hold an external locus of control, we attribute the outcome to luck, fate, or other factors beyond our control. As you might be able to guess, we typically hold an internal locus of control for our successes and an external locus of control for our failures.
I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.
– Carl Jung, pioneer of analytical psychology, on an internal locus of control
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
