Abstract
For more than 20 years now, personal control has been among the most ubiquitous concepts employed by personality and social psychologists. How much control people believe they have over an event can set in motion a large number of either positive or negative consequences (cf. Burger, 1989; Lefcourt, 1982; Thompson, Cheek, & Graham, 1988). Personal control has been a central concept in theory and research on learned helplessness, Type A behavior, intrinsic motivation, and locus of control. How much control we believe we have over a situation has been used to explain depression, achievement striving, gambling, crowding, health behavior, attributional processing, and aggression.
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Burger, J.M. (1993). Individual Differences in Control Motivation and Social Information Processing. In: Weary, G., Gleicher, F., Marsh, K.L. (eds) Control Motivation and Social Cognition. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8309-3_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8309-3_8
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