Julian B. Rotter

Introduction

Julian B. Rotter (22 October 1916 – 6 January 2014) was an American psychologist whose work reshaped clinical and personality psychology in the middle of the twentieth century. He is known for two things that are more closely connected than they first appear: a social learning theory that treated behaviour as a joint function of what a person expects to happen and how much the person values the outcome, and the construct of locus of control, which asks whether people believe their own actions or outside forces determine what happens to them. Both ideas were attempts to make clinical concepts measurable at a time when personality theory was largely speculative, and both were accompanied by instruments that other researchers could administer and score.

Rotter spent the first part of his career at Ohio State University, where he directed the clinical psychology programme and wrote the book that made his reputation, and the second at the University of Connecticut, where he directed clinical training from 1963 until his retirement in 1986. The American Psychological Association gave him its Distinguished Scientific Contribution award in 1988, citing a social learning framework that "transformed behavioral approaches to personality and clinical psychology." The measurement tools he introduced, however, have attracted sustained psychometric criticism, and the history of locus of control is in large part a history of attempts to fix his scale.

Early Life and Education

Rotter was born in Brooklyn, New York, the third son of Jewish immigrant parents. His father worked in the printing business. Rotter later said that watching how people around him fared during the Great Depression shaped his thinking about why some people keep trying while others give up, and biographers have treated those years as the origin of his interest in expectation and motivation.

He entered Brooklyn College in 1933 and majored in chemistry, a pragmatic choice during a depressed job market, while pursuing his real interest in psychology and philosophy. Two teachers mattered to him. Solomon Asch, then absorbed in the controversy between Gestalt and Thorndikian accounts of learning, drew him toward experimental work on learning; Alfred Adler, then teaching in New York, invited the undergraduate Rotter to his weekly clinic after Rotter asked a question at a public lecture. Adler's emphasis on goals and social embeddedness stayed with him.

Rotter earned a master's degree at the University of Iowa in 1938, studying with Kurt Lewin, whose field theory, with its emphasis on goals, valences and barriers, strongly influenced his later theorising. At Iowa he also encountered Wendell Johnson's general semantics, which impressed on him the damage done by poorly defined and poorly operationalised constructs, a concern that runs through everything he later wrote. He completed his doctorate at Indiana University Bloomington in 1941 under C. M. Louttit, continuing work on level of aspiration. His clinical internship was at Worcester State Hospital, then one of the few formal internships in psychology, where he met the intern Clara Barnes, whom he later married.

Academic and Professional Career

After his doctorate Rotter was unable to obtain a faculty position, a rejection he attributed to the anti-Semitism then common in American academia, and he took a post at Norwich Hospital. He was then drafted into the United States Army during the Second World War. Apart from seventeen weeks of officer candidate training in the tank corps, he served as a psychologist, working with soldiers diagnosed with what was then called shell shock.

He returned briefly to Norwich and was then recruited to Ohio State University, where he taught, ran the psychological services clinic that Louttit had previously headed, and directed the clinical psychology programme. Walter Mischel and others trained there in this period, and Rotter worked alongside George Kelly. The Rotter Incomplete Sentences Blank appeared in 1950 and Social Learning and Clinical Psychology in 1954. In 1949 he attended the Boulder Conference, which defined standards for the new field of clinical psychology, and he is often described as one of the architects of the scientist-practitioner model that came out of it.

In 1963 Rotter moved to the University of Connecticut as programme director of clinical psychology, and he remained there for the rest of his career. He developed the Interpersonal Trust Scale around this time, served as president of the American Psychological Association's Division of Clinical Psychology and of its Division of Social and Personality Psychology, and of the Eastern Psychological Association. He retired in 1986 and died at his home in Mansfield, Connecticut, on 6 January 2014, aged 97.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Social Learning and Clinical Psychology (1954) proposed that the probability of a given behaviour is a function of the person's expectancy that the behaviour will lead to a particular outcome and the reinforcement value, that is the degree to which the person wants that outcome. Behaviour potential, expectancy, reinforcement value and the psychological situation were the four core variables. This was a deliberate departure from both psychoanalysis, which Rotter regarded as untestable, and from the radical behaviourism of B. F. Skinner, which he thought could not accommodate the fact that people act on what they believe will happen. Because the variables were meant to be estimated rather than merely asserted, the theory invited empirical test at a moment when personality theory offered little of the kind.

Locus of control

Locus of control generalises the expectancy variable across situations. Some people, internals, act as though their own efforts determine what they get; others, externals, act as though outcomes are governed by luck, chance, fate or powerful others. Rotter introduced the construct in the 1950s and published the Internal-External, or I-E, Scale in 1966 in Psychological Monographs. The scale has twenty-nine forced-choice pairs, six of which are fillers intended to disguise its purpose. Scores were used to predict everything from academic persistence and health behaviour to political activism, and locus of control became one of the most frequently cited individual-difference variables in psychology.

The Incomplete Sentences Blank and interpersonal trust

The Rotter Incomplete Sentences Blank asks respondents to complete sentence stems and is scored for adjustment, and it became one of the most widely used instruments of its kind in clinical and screening settings. The Interpersonal Trust Scale, published in 1967, measured a related generalised expectancy, the extent to which a person expects the word or promise of another to be reliable.

Major Publications

Rotter, J. B., & Rafferty, J. E. (1950). The Rotter Incomplete Sentences Blank
Rotter, J. B. (1954). Social Learning and Clinical Psychology
Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs, 80(1), 1–28
Rotter, J. B. (1967). A new scale for the measurement of interpersonal trust. Journal of Personality, 35(4), 651–665
Rotter, J. B., Chance, J. E., & Phares, E. J. (1972). Applications of a Social Learning Theory of Personality

Impact and Legacy

Rotter provided a bridge between the psychology of learning and the social, clinical and personality applications that followed. His framework is generally regarded as a precondition for the observational learning work of Albert Bandura and for the cognitive social-learning tradition associated with Mischel, and it fed into later work on perceived control, self-efficacy, and learned helplessness in the tradition of Martin Seligman. A 2002 survey published in Review of General Psychology placed him sixty-fourth among the most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century. Biographical sources also list a William James Fellow Award.

The criticism has concentrated on measurement, and it is substantial. Rotter built the I-E Scale as a unidimensional, bipolar instrument, but factor analyses of it almost immediately produced multidimensional solutions. Mirels (1970), Abramowitz (1973), Gurin and colleagues (1969), and several later studies found that the items separate into more than one factor, most consistently into beliefs about personal control and beliefs about the political and social order. Correlations between I-E scores and other variables were often low, and the pattern of results became difficult to interpret.

The most influential response was Hanna Levenson's, who argued that Rotter had oversimplified externality. Someone who believes that powerful others control outcomes behaves differently from someone who believes the world is simply chaotic, and the distinction matters because only in the first case is there an agent to contest. Levenson's Internal, Powerful Others and Chance scales, developed in the early 1970s, separated the two. Studies comparing the two instruments found that Rotter's scale largely captured chance externality, which means a great deal of research using it was measuring something narrower than its authors assumed. Later work added two further problems, domain specificity, since a person may be internal about health and external about politics, and social desirability, since internality is the approved answer in many settings.

Rotter did not ignore this. He acknowledged in 1975 that the greater variability among externals suggested the external group was composed of two different groups, and his own training under Wendell Johnson had made him unusually alert to definitional sloppiness. His defenders also point out that the scale was designed for group comparison rather than individual prediction, and that much of the criticism amounts to using an instrument for a purpose its author disclaimed.

There is a further twist. The multidimensional alternatives did not settle the question either. Subsequent research failed to produce clear evidence favouring Levenson's tripartite model or the more elaborate structural models that followed, and recent work has returned to a simple two-factor structure of internality and externality measured separately, exemplified by the ultra-short IE-4 scale. The field has therefore kept the construct while giving up on the idea that a single bipolar score captures it.

A second line of criticism is conceptual rather than statistical. Because internality is presented as the healthier and more adaptive orientation, locus of control research has been accused of individualising structural problems, implying that people in genuinely constrained situations should simply believe harder. Work on Black Americans in the 1960s and 1970s, which found externality associated with experiences of discrimination, cuts against any simple reading of externality as a deficit. Rotter's answer was built into the theory itself: generalised expectancies are learned from experience, so where outcomes really are uncontrollable, an external expectancy is accurate rather than pathological. Whether the construct is used that carefully in applied settings remains an open question.

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References

Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs, 80(1), 1-28.