Julian Rotter

Julian B. Rotter (1916 to 2014) was an American psychologist known for developing social learning theory and for his research on locus of control, the idea that people differ in whether they see the outcomes of their lives as governed by their own actions or by outside forces. He was a faculty member at Ohio State University and later at the University of Connecticut. A 2002 survey in Review of General Psychology ranked him the sixty-fourth most eminent and eighteenth most widely cited psychologist of the twentieth century, and a 2014 study placed him fifty-fourth among psychologists whose careers spanned the years after the Second World War. His work links the study of personality to learning, expectancy and the perceived value of outcomes, and it continues to be cited in clinical, health and educational psychology.