Locus of Control and the Acknowledgment of Effort

Abstract

What individual characteristics predict inequality acceptance? Previous literature has focused on economic and sociological determinants of accepting inequalities. Here, we present experimental evidence of one individual correlate of inequality acceptance: the personality trait known as locus of control. In our study, inequality is induced experimentally through the exogenous assignment to one of two experimental treatments. In one treatment, initial inequalities depend on individual performance in a previous real-effort task, that is, they are earned through effort, while in the other they are randomly determined. We report that people who show an internal locus of control (the belief that life’s outcomes are under one’s control) are significantly more likely to accept both arbitrary and effort-based inequalities, although they accept the latter more often.