Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionV. Learning Theories 17. Rotter and Mischel:
Cognitive Social Learning
Theory(^546) © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2009
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 gen-
erated 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 out-
come is more extraordinary than the outcome selected by psychologist Elizabeth
Midlarsky and her colleagues. Midlarsky sought to use personality variables to pre-
dict 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 dur-
ing 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 conducted, 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 predict
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 over life
events and success is not due to luck or chance (as people with an external sense of
control would believe). To use Rotter’s language (Rotter, 1966), these internal con-
trols are people who have a generalized expectancy that their acts would be success-
ful in saving the lives of their persecuted neighbors. Other variables Midlarsky and
her colleagues examined were autonomy (having a sense of independence), risk tak-
ing, social responsibility, authoritarianism (related to holding prejudiced attitudes to-
ward minority groups and is the opposite of tolerance), empathy, and altruistic moral
reasoning (high levels of which require abstract reasoning including the use of inter-
nalized values). All personality variables were measured using standard self-report
540 Part V Learning Theories