Locus of Control – Part 2
How “antiracism” lessons are denying kids greater well-being by externalizing their locus of control.
In the previous essay we discussed Stephen Nowicki’s book Choice or Chance: Understanding Your Locus of Control and Why It Matters, in which he describes the effects on well-being of people’s views of the extent of control they have over their own lives:
If we see ourselves as governed by fate, luck, chance, or powerful others, we are externally controlled, or “External.” If we see ourselves and our own actions as the cause of the circumstances of our lives, we are internally controlled, or “Internal.”
Essentially, locus of control is the degree to which we expect what happens to us, good or bad, is connected to our behavior. Those with a more internal locus of control tend to be happier than those with a more external locus of control. In this essay, we’ll look at the effects of parents and institutions on the incentives younger people have to develop a more internal or external locus of control.
Nowicki explains that the concept of “helicopter parenting” (an overly-protective form of parenting) is a manifestation of an external locus of control approach.
[W]e would expect helicopter parents would have children who would be more External. Shirley Lynch and her colleagues evaluated that possibility and found it to be true. Their study describes parents who prevent the school system from enforcing consequences for inappropriate behavior as “enabling parents.”
And, indeed, as we explored in a previous essay, the modern trend toward “restorative practices,” which discourages school discipline in favor of “discussion circles,” is a manifestation of school systems as “enabling school systems.”
Regarding parents again, Nowicki writes:
A few researchers have looked at the association of parents’ LOC [locus of control] with their children's behavior. What they have found is intriguing, especially with respect to Internality. According to Duane Ollendick's study, when both parents were External, their fourth-grade children were likely to be more anxious and lower achieving in school. But when one parent (either father or mother) was Internal, the negative associations with anxiety and achievement disappeared. He concluded there were “benefits of children having at least one internally controlled parent.” However, bad news about the effects of parental Externality was uncovered by Rachel Freed and Martha Tompson of Boston University. Maternal Externality, as measured by a parental Locus of Control scale, appears to co-occur with behavior problems in elementary school–age children. Freed and Tompson took their study a step further by retesting the mothers and children a year later. Unfortunately, not only had children's “acting out” problems increased in the year that had elapsed, but the mothers’ LOC had become even more External. The researchers concluded this result reflected a “bi-directionality,” otherwise known as a vicious circle between parental Externality and children's difficulties—that is, each influenced changes in the other in an ongoing spiral of negativity.
Might governments and universities that cater to the demands of a relatively small subset of their students using the rhetoric of “systemic racism” also be engaging in “an ongoing spiral of negativity” by parroting the same rhetoric? Just as parents with a generally external locus of control will tend to inculcate the same outlook in their children, and vice versa, one would expect governments and universities that promote the view that America or the world is a place of “systemic racism” will also be inculcating the same external outlook among citizens and students, to great detriment to their own well-being.
Nowicki describes the early research on locus of control, going back to the 1960’s, when the research focused on education in a study mandated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964:
Locus of Control was catapulted into public awareness largely by results published in Equality of Educational Opportunity, known as the Coleman Report, a groundbreaking study of race and public education. Published in 1966, the same year as Julian Rotter's LOC article, it analyzed the responses of more than half a million elementary and high school students on a wide range of educational topics and concerns. It was the first broad-based study that attempted to evaluate the state of education in the lives of both African American and European American students in the United States. Its more than seven hundred pages of text provided both facts and opinions about where American public education was and where it needed to go in regard to the impact of segregated and integrated classrooms on school achievement. Of specific interest for us in regard to Locus of Control, one relevant—and controversial—conclusion of the report was that non-IQ factors were important in determining how much students achieved, especially African American students. Buried somewhere in the dense text and multitude of tables that filled the Coleman Report was a finding so impressive it provided an impetus for the many studies that would follow, studies that firmly established the importance of LOC in predicting academic achievement. Even more amazing, the finding was obtained using only a few LOC items (because of the number of tests given, all tests were shortened to fit in with time restrictions). In fact, because this study took place before the concept of LOC became so popular, researchers more or less sneaked these items in to see if they might be related to achievement. What the few items predicted stunned investigators. Of all the nonacademic items included in the study, they provided the best nonacademic predictor of academic achievement for African Americans and the second-best one for European American students!
So a seminal report required by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 found that, among all nonacademic traits, an internal locus of control was most associated with future academic success among blacks. Yet today, the rhetoric of “antiracism” and its associated promotion of “systemic racism” as a universal force, is stifling exactly the outlook most associated with success. The promotion of feelings of victimization based on false assumptions will only tend to inculcate a more external locus of control among people, and fail to recognize Booker T. Washington’s insight from well over a hundred years ago: “The persons who accomplish the most in this world … are those who are constantly seeing and appreciating the bright side as well as the dark side of life.”
Harvard economist Roland Fryer (who is black) recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the evidence is overwhelming that all or most of the racial disparities we see along many metrics result not from racism, but from a comparative lack of skills, and statements to the contrary can only discourage individual action in the face of imagined barriers. Fryer writes:
[A]n honest review of the evidence suggests that current racial inequities are more a result of differences in skill than differences in treatment of those with the same skill ... [T]here is also a cost to overemphasizing its impact. A black kid who believes he will face daunting societal obstacles is likely to underinvest in trying to climb society’s rungs.
Eric Kauffman authored a report titled “The Social Construction of Racism in the United States” and found the following effects on blacks after reading a passage from a prominent author who promotes the narrative that “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body.” As Kauffman writes:
Might the emerging ideology of critical race theory (CRT) distort perceptions of racism among both blacks and whites? If so, what might this imply for the well-being of African-Americans? … In order to assess the possible impact of CRT on black empowerment, I had part of the survey sample[s] first read a passage from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Letter to My Son” [that included the following text]:
• “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage … And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body … The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions … But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can protect you only with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or succeeded at something much darker.”
Another group read no passage before answering, while a third group read a different passage that I composed [which included the following text]:
• “African-Americans are the descendants of conquerors. Their ancestors were Bantu speakers: cattle-herders who swept out of West Africa. As Jared Diamond, scientist and renowned author of Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) writes, the Bantu, with their superior technology and resistance to animal-borne disease, displaced the lighter-skinned Khoisan (Bushmen) and pygmy indigenous peoples of southern and eastern Africa. The natives, writes Diamond, were largely wiped out by the Bantu through conquest, expulsion, interbreeding, killing, or epidemics. The same process of agriculturalists wiping out hunter-gatherers occurred with European settlement of the Americas. West Africans, many from sophisticated city states and kingdoms like the Ashanti Empire, had a long internal tradition of slavery and were active in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which could not have happened without them …”
I then asked respondents to indicate what their view was (strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree, don’t know) of the passage that they had read and to answer several questions on what psychologists refer to as the locus of control scale, which measures whether people feel able to control their lives or whether they think that their fate is determined by forces outside their control … The measures were:
• When I make plans, I am almost certain that I can make them work.
• No matter how much I try, I don’t receive any credit for what I do.
• It is my responsibility to make the most of my talents and abilities.
Combining the results in [the surveys] on the first statement show that 83% of blacks who did not read the Coates passage said that they could make their life plans work out—while only 68% of those who read Coates said that they could do so (Figure 13). The impact of even one short passage of CRT was enough to reduce black respondents’ sense of control over their lives. [Figure 14] shows that reading the Coates passage had a significant disempowering effect on blacks on all three locus of control measures.
Harvard professor Orlando Patterson edited a book titled “The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth,” which included a chapter titled “’I Do Me’: Young Black Men and the Struggle to Resist the Street,” by Peter Rosenblatt, Kathryn Edin, and Queenie Zhu. That research examined through interviews how young blacks managed to avoid involvement in negative and criminal activities present in their neighborhoods. Their main strategy reflects their association with an internal locus of control:
Turning away from the street often leads these young men to adopt a strong code of self-reliance, which several describe with the expression “I do me.” I do me is about controlling what you are able to control and not worrying about the rest … Gary is an old soul at twenty-three. He values what he refers to as the “old school upbringing,” which preaches respect and hard work, and laments what he sees as the decline of these values among youth of his generation … [M]any who resist the street espouse an ideology of “I do me,” which involves focusing on one’s own goals without reference to the reactions of others and, most importantly, espouses the idea that a young man should not have to rely on anyone else … [M]any young men deploy the “I do me” ethos as they navigate a different path. Despite the sharp structural obstacles they face, these youth believe that this ethos, and their determination to abide by its dictates, sets them apart from more delinquent peers.
As Nowicki writes, the comparatively greater freedom allowed in America should give us an advantage in inculcating internal locus of control. But that hasn’t turned out to be the case:
In the United States, the Great American Dream promises our country will give the opportunity for success to everyone who is willing to work hard. Because the concept of Internality fits this notion so well, we in the United States should be at the forefront of fostering its development and growth. But we are not. We in the United States are failing to produce the conditions necessary for the growth of Internal Locus of Control. In fact, our failure to do so is stunning. Consider an epic study completed in 2004 by Jean Twenge, Liqing Zhang, and Charles Im from San Diego State and Case Western Reserve Universities. They collected thousands of LOC scores from thirty years of studies of children and adults. When they took the average score of each year and plotted it over time, it showed that over the past thirty years, children and adults in the United States had become significantly less Internal and significantly more External.
Clarence Jones was Martin Luther King’s chief speechwriter in the 1960's, had this to say in 2024 regarding the state of civil rights education today, amd its negative effects on young black people:
Jones worries that some of today’s social justice measures have strayed too far from King’s original message. He points to an ethnic studies curriculum for public schools in California, proposed in 2020, which sought to teach K–12 students about the marginalization of black, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian American peoples. Jones fiercely opposed the new curriculum recommendations, calling them, in a letter to Governor Gavin Newsom, a “perversion of history” that “will inflict great harm on millions of students in our state.” He wrote that the proposed curriculum excluded “the intellectual and moral basis for radical nonviolence advocated by Dr. King” and his colleagues. “They were promoting black nationalism,” he told me. “They were promoting blackness over excellence.” California later passed a watered-down version of the curriculum. At the same time, Jones feels more conflicted about affirmative action, a policy he believes was grounded in “the most genuine, the most beautiful, the most thoughtful” intentions, and that it helped to “accelerate the timetable. . . to truly give black people equal access.” Even so, he is pragmatic about the Supreme Court’s decision to strike it down last year. “You had to stop the escalator somewhere.”
According to the meta-analysis of 97 studies Nowicki refers to, with results running from 1960 to 2002, locus of control among college students fell steadily over the course of that time span, with the average student of 2002 displaying a lower sense of autonomy than did 80 percent of college students in 1960.
More recent evidence indicates that trend continues.
As Nowicki explains, the problem with promoting an external locus of control is that it diverts people’s attention away from both the choices they can make right now, and with it the sense of responsibility people should have about the need to decide between those various possibilities:
We must understand we are always choosing how to behave from among a variety of options we have available. Externals are not aware they have choices; they believe they only have a few. Becoming aware of the fact of the existence of options is one of our first steps to thinking and acting in more internally controlled ways. As we become aware we have many options to choose from, we also become more aware we must take responsibility for the choices we make. Constant evaluation of our choices is a crucial part of the process of thinking and acting more Internally. Evaluation helps us to highlight the most advantageous choices and discard those that are encumbering and self-destructive.
If one becomes convinced of the false notion that “systemic racism” is holding one back, one could easily lose sight of all the options for self-improvement already available, and the need to responsibly choose from those options. In the absence of that understanding, unhappiness sets in:
One of the potential unpleasant legacies of increasing Externality may be a conspicuous increase in unhappiness. Indeed, more Americans than ever before in the history of mental health are being diagnosed with major depressive disorders. And depression is occurring at increasingly younger ages. In fact, today's young adults are much more likely to be diagnosed with a major depressive disorder than their peers were thirty years ago. Some studies have suggested they are even as much as ten times more likely to receive this diagnosis. This finding is all the more alarming because it is estimated that around 80 percent of suicide attempts originate in people suffering from depression. Not surprisingly, then, as depression has increased, so has the incidence of suicide. While part of this increase may be due to greater knowledge about the disorder of depression itself and increased sensitivity to its occurrence, it is unlikely these factors account for all the rise in frequency.
How to start to remedy this situation? Nowicki describes the following exercise:
To become aware of the extent of your Externality, record yourself talking about a problem you are having, whether at work, at school, or in your social life. Afterward, count the number of absolute, negative, and repetitive statements you make. Write each one down and come up with a relative, positive, and different response to say out loud and write down in a notebook. Such exercises can help you become more aware of your self-talk, which is often used in a self-injurious way, resulting in enhanced Externality.
Just imagine if entities promoting victimization had to submit their own rhetoric to the same exercise.
Claims of “systemic racism” not only encourage external locus of control among those who come to believe its false assumptions, but they also come with calls for “solutions” that impose greater restrictions on others (such as denying Asian students spots in academic programs even though they may over-perform others competing for those same slots) that will tend to give those others a more external sense of their own locus of control, further worsening the situation for everyone. Calls for the suppression of speech in the name of a perverse form of “social justice” also further encourage an external locus of control among those whose speech is suppressed. And while a minimal social safety net in the form of government benefits for those in need will encourage an internal locus of control by preventing crippling poverty for those who can’t do for themselves, a more generous social safety net can only encourage dependence and an external locus of control, a topic to be explored in a future essay series.