Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionV. Learning Theories 17. Rotter and Mischel:
Cognitive Social Learning
Theory© The McGraw−Hill^517
Companies, 2009goals, and personal standards, play important roles in shaping personality. His contri-
butions 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 oldest 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 condi-
tion as “comfortably middle class until the Great Depression when my father lost his
wholesale stationery business and we became part of the masses of unemployed 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 particularly
impressed by Adler and Freud and soon returned for more (Rotter, 1982, 1993).
When he entered Brooklyn College, he was already seriously interested in psy-
chology, but he chose to major in chemistry because it seemed to be a more em-
ployable 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 clinical demon-
strations. 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 com-
pleted an internship in clinical psychology at Worcester State Hospital in Massa-
chusetts, 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 students,
including Walter Mischel. For more than a dozen years, Rotter and George Kelly
(see Chapter 18) reigned as the two most dominant members of the psychology
department at Ohio State. However, Rotter was unhappy with the political effects
of McCarthyism in Ohio, and in 1963, he took a position at the University ofChapter 17 Rotter and Mischel: Cognitive Social Learning Theory 511