Chapter 18 Rotter and Mischel: Cognitive Social Learning Theory 559important of these variables include (1) encoding strategies, or how people con-
strue or categorize an event; (2) competencies and self-regulating strategies: that
is, what people can do and their strategies and plans to accomplish a desired
behavior; (3) behavior-outcome and stimulus-outcome expectancies and beliefs
regarding a particular situation; (4) subjective goals, values, and preferences that
partially determine selective attention to events; and (5) affective responses, includ-
ing feelings and emotions as well as the affects that accompany physiological
reactions.
Related Research
Rotter’s ideas on internal and external control have generated considerable research
in psychology with many researchers from across disciplines drawing upon Rotter’s
concepts for their own research. Mischel’s CAPS model, though a relatively new
model of personality (it was first proposed in its entirety in the mid-1990s) has
generated a strong body of work considering its age with several studies focusing
on the if-then framework previously discussed.
Locus of Control and Holocaust Heroes
As you have read throughout this book, personality variables can be used to predict
innumerable outcomes. Some outcomes are rather mundane and routine such as
whether La Juan will rest her head during a dull lecture, whereas others are extraor-
dinary such as whether La Juan will earn a PhD in psychology. But perhaps no
outcome is more extraordinary than the outcome selected by psychologist Elizabeth
Midlarsky and her colleagues. Midlarsky sought to use personality variables to
predict who was a Holocaust hero and who was a bystander during the tragic years
of World War II (Midlarsky, Fagin Jones, & Corley, 2005). The genocide of
6 million Jews by the Nazis was so extreme, so awful, that it is hard to imagine
that just one half of 1% of the people in Nazi-occupied territory elected to assist
their Jewish neighbors when their neighbors’ lives were in such great peril (Oliner
& Oliner, 1988). But the danger posed to those who assisted Jews was equal to
the danger of being Jewish, so the acts of non-Jewish civilians who put their own
lives on the line to assist their persecuted neighbors were truly rare and heroic acts.
To investigate the power of personality to predict such rare, heroic acts,
Midlarsky and her colleagues assembled a remarkable sample of people consisting
of 80 rescuers of Jews during World War II, 73 bystanders who lived in Europe
during World War II but did not assist Jews, and a comparison sample of 43 people
who were from Europe but immigrated to North America before the war. The
participants were about 72 years of age on average at the time the study was con-
ducted, which means most of them were in their twenties during World War II.
Rescuer status was verified by the testimony of Holocaust survivors who were
actually rescued by the participants in this study.
The researchers included several personality variables in their effort to pre-
dict who was a hero and who was a bystander; one such variable was locus of
control. Being oriented more toward an internal sense of control was predicted to
relate to being a Holocaust hero because such individuals believe they have control