530 Part VI Learning-Cognitive Theories
goals, and personal standards, play important roles in shaping personality. His con-
tributions to personality theory have evolved from research on delay of gratification,
to research regarding the consistency or inconsistency of personality, and presently
to work with Yuichi Shoda on the development of a cognitive-affective personality
system.Biography of Julian Rotter
Julian B. Rotter, the author of the locus of control scale, was born in Brooklyn on
October 22, 1916, the third and youngest son of Jewish immigrant parents. Rotter
(1993) recalled that he fit Adler’s description of a highly competitive, “fighting”
youngest child. Although his parents observed the Jewish religion and customs,
they were not very religious. Rotter (1993) described his family’s socioeconomic
condition as “comfortably middle class until the Great Depression when my father
lost his wholesale stationery business and we became part of the masses of unem-
ployed for two years” (pp. 273–274). The depression sparked in Rotter a lifelong
concern for social injustice and taught him the importance of situational conditions
affecting human behavior.
As an elementary school and high school student, he was an avid reader and
by his junior year had read nearly every book of fiction in the local public library.
That being the case, he turned one day to the psychology shelves where he found
Adler’s (1927) Understanding Human Nature, Freud’s (1901/1960) Psychopathology
of Everyday Life, and Karl Menninger’s (1920) The Human Mind. He was particu-
larly impressed by Adler and Freud and soon returned for more (Rotter, 1982, 1993).
When he entered Brooklyn College, he was already seriously interested in
psychology, but he chose to major in chemistry because it seemed to be a more
employable degree during the depression of the 1930s. As a junior at Brooklyn
College, he learned that Adler was a professor of medical psychology at Long Island
College of Medicine. He attended Adler’s medical lectures and several of his clin-
ical demonstrations. Eventually, he came to personally know Adler, who invited
him to attend meetings of the Society for Individual Psychology (Rotter, 1993).
When Rotter graduated from Brooklyn College in 1937, he had more credits
in psychology than in chemistry. He then entered graduate school in psychology
at the University of Iowa, from which he received a master’s degree in 1938. He
completed an internship in clinical psychology at Worcester State Hospital in
Massachusetts, where he met his future wife, Clara Barnes. In 1941, Rotter received
his PhD in clinical psychology from Indiana University.
That same year Rotter accepted a position as clinical psychologist at Norwich
State Hospital in Connecticut, where his duties included training interns and assis-
tants from the University of Connecticut and Wesleyan University. At the advent
of World War II, he was drafted into the army and spent more than 3 years as an
army psychologist.
After the war, Rotter returned briefly to Norwich, but he soon took a job at
Ohio State University, where he attracted a number of outstanding graduate stu-
dents, including Walter Mischel. For more than a dozen years, Rotter and George
Kelly (see Chapter 19) reigned as the two most dominant members of the psychol-
ogy department at Ohio State. However, Rotter was unhappy with the political