Abstract
Personal control has been among the most ubiquitous topics in social and personality psychology for many years now. I recently thumbed through the tables of contents of several social psychology textbooks and could not find one chapter topic that researchers had not in some way tied to how much control people believe they have over events or the extent to which people are motivated to exercise personal control. Conformity, aggression, attitude change, gender roles, attributions, group dynamics, person perception, and the like all have been examined as a function of perceived control or motivation for control. Perhaps this ubiquity should come as no surprise. In any given situation, whether I believe I can control events or whether I want to control events intuitively is linked to the kind of action I decide to take.
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Burger, J.M. (1995). Need for Control and Self-Esteem. In: Kernis, M.H. (eds) Efficacy, Agency, and Self-Esteem. The Springer Series in Social Clinical Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1280-0_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1280-0_11
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