Desirability of Control Scale

Abstract

The Desirability of Control Scale (DCS) is a self-report psychometric instrument developed by Jerry M. Burger and Harris M. Cooper in 1979 to evaluate individual differences in the general motivational preference to exert control over life events, decisions, and interpersonal environments. Prior to its introduction, personality and social psychological research predominantly focused on expectancies of control—most notably captured by Julian B. Rotter’s locus of control construct—while neglecting the distinct motivational component regarding how much an individual actually wishes or strives to possess control. Comprising 20 items evaluated on a 7-point Likert-type response scale ranging from 1 (“The statement does not apply to me at all”) to 7 (“The statement always applies to me”), the DCS yields an overall score where higher values reflect a heightened desire for control (DC). The scale exhibits sound psychometric properties, demonstrating an internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha) of approximately .80 and a six-week test-retest reliability coefficient of .75. Discriminant validity has been consistently established against measures of perceived locus of control, social desirability, and general intelligence, while convergent and predictive validity have been documented across diverse domains, including cognitive illusions of control, learned helplessness, psychological reactance, achievement motivation, health-related behaviors, coping styles under stress, and vulnerability to depression. Although initially conceptualized as a unidimensional measurement tool, subsequent psychometric and factor analytic inquiries have uncovered distinct multifaceted dimensions, including decisional control, leadership, assertiveness, and avoidance of dependency. This article provides a comprehensive academic analysis of the DCS, synthesizing its theoretical foundations, structural and factorial properties, clinical and experimental applications, scoring mechanics, and full psychometric profile.

Keywords

Desirability of Control Scale, Jerry Burger, desire for control, personal control, locus of control, psychological reactance, learned helplessness, illusion of control, effectance motivation, psychometrics

Authors

The Desirability of Control Scale was developed and validated through the collaborative work of two distinguished social psychologists:

• Jerry M. Burger, Ph.D. — Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Santa Clara University, California, United States. Dr. Burger is widely renowned for his extensive experimental and personality research on personal control, human compliance, social influence (including his landmark 2009 replication of Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments), and cognitive biases.
• Harris M. Cooper, Ph.D. — Hugo L. Blomquist Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, North Carolina, United States (formerly affiliated with the University of Missouri-Columbia during the inception of the scale). Dr. Cooper is a recognized authority in research synthesis, meta-analytic methodologies, social development, and educational psychology.

Purpose

The Desirability of Control Scale was constructed to address a critical theoretical and empirical gap within personality psychology and experimental social psychology during the late 1970s. For decades, researchers investigating human agency, motivation, and coping operated under the implicit paradigm of locus of control, advanced by Julian B. Rotter (1966). Rotter’s framework conceptualized control strictly in terms of generalized expectancies: individuals either believe that outcomes are contingent upon their own actions, skill, and effort (internal locus of control) or that outcomes are governed by luck, chance, fate, or powerful external forces (external locus of control).

Burger and Cooper (1979) recognized that expectancy of control represents only half of the motivational equation. The expectancy that one can control an outcome is conceptually distinct from the intrinsic desire, preference, or psychological need to exert control over that outcome. Two individuals may possess an identical internal locus of control, yet one may aggressively seek out leadership, insist on making autonomous decisions, and actively resist external constraints, whereas the other may prefer delegating responsibility and avoiding the cognitive strain of constant decision-making. The primary purpose of the DCS is therefore to quantify this trait-level motivational drive to exercise mastery, personal agency, and autonomy over one’s immediate environment and life trajectory.

In research settings, the DCS serves as an essential predictor and moderating variable in laboratory paradigms investigating:

• Illusions of Control: Determining why certain individuals systematically overestimate their personal influence over purely chance-determined tasks, such as lotteries or card games.
• Learned Helplessness and Reactance: Explaining differential coping trajectories when individuals encounter uncontrollable stressors. While some individuals quickly succumb to passive helplessness, high-DC individuals typically mount fierce psychological reactance before experiencing profound distress if control cannot be restored.
• Cognitive Attributions and Self-Serving Biases: Examining how personal control motivation shapes causal attributions for success and failure.
• Health and Medical Adherence: Predicting how patients cope with invasive medical procedures, chronic illness regimens, and institutionalization (such as nursing home placement), where personal autonomy is frequently curtailed.

In clinical, organizational, and counseling psychology, the DCS provides practitioners with diagnostic insight into clients’ interpersonal dynamics, resistance to authority, decision fatigue, perfectionism, and susceptibility to affective disorders when facing uncontrollable life transitions.

Psychological Construct

The core psychological construct measured by the DCS is the Desire for Control (DC), defined as a stable, general personality trait reflecting the extent to which an individual is motivated to establish, maintain, and exert control over the events, choices, and interpersonal interactions encountered in life. Rather than assessing perceived competence or outcome expectations, the construct captures the motivational valence assigned to personal agency.

High Desire for Control Profile

Individuals scoring high on the DCS are characterized by a proactive, assertive, and self-determining behavioral orientation. Key cognitive, behavioral, and emotional manifestations include:

• Preference for Leadership and Autonomy: High-DC individuals gravitate toward leadership positions, self-employment, and open-ended occupational roles where they dictate schedules, goals, and methodologies. They experience acute discomfort in subordinate positions where decisions are imposed by others.
• Vigorous Problem-Solving: When faced with obstacles, high-DC persons display high persistence and an action-oriented mindset, intervening immediately rather than waiting for external remediation.
• Vulnerability to Illusions of Control: Because high-DC individuals are heavily invested in mastering their environment, they are more susceptible to cognitive biases wherein skill-related cues (e.g., choice, active participation, familiarity) lead them to believe they can influence random or chance events.
• Depressive Reactions to Persistent Failure: Although high-DC individuals are generally resilient and proactive, encountering prolonged, objectively uncontrollable failure can trigger severe psychological distress. Because they attribute outcomes to personal agency, failure to control an outcome is often internalized as personal inadequacy.

Low Desire for Control Profile

Conversely, individuals scoring low on the DCS demonstrate an accommodating, deferential, and collaborative disposition. Their profile is characterized by:

• Comfort with Delegation: Low-DC individuals readily delegate significant decisions to experts, authority figures, or group consensus, often feeling relieved when relieved of the cognitive burden of decision-making.
• Acceptance of External Constraints: They exhibit greater tolerance for structured, rule-bound environments and show lower levels of psychological reactance when external rules restrict behavioral latitude.
• Reduced Attributional Distress: In situations characterized by ambiguity or inevitable failure, low-DC individuals experience less self-blame, easily recognizing external or environmental limits without viewing systemic barriers as a personal indictment.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture underpinning the Desirability of Control Scale synthesizes several foundational paradigms from mid-to-late 20th-century motivational, social, and personality psychology:

1. White’s Effectance Motivation and DeCharms’ Personal Causation

The concept of a fundamental human need to manipulate and master the environment traces directly to Robert W. White‘s (1959) formulation of effectance motivation. White posited that organisms possess an intrinsic drive toward competence that cannot be reduced to primary biological drives (such as hunger or thirst). Richard deCharms (1968) expanded this concept through his model of personal causation, proposing that humans strive to perceive themselves as primary “Origins” of their behavior rather than helpless “Pawns” manipulated by external forces. Burger and Cooper (1979) translated these broad humanistic and evolutionary concepts into a differential, psychometrically measurable trait variable.

2. Rotter’s Social Learning Theory

Under Julian Rotter‘s (1954, 1966) social learning theory, behavior potential is a function of expectancy and reinforcement value: $BP = f(E, RV)$. Rotter’s locus of control construct measured expectancy ($E$). However, Burger and Cooper argued that the reinforcement value ($RV$) of control itself had been empirically neglected. The DCS quantifies the reinforcement value an individual places on possessing personal mastery over behavioral outcomes, establishing the missing component of the social learning equation regarding control dynamics.

3. The Wortman and Brehm Reactance-Helplessness Integration

A central theoretical model operationalized by the DCS is Camille Wortman and Jack Brehm‘s (1975) integration of psychological reactance and learned helplessness (Seligman, 1975). According to Brehm’s reactance theory, whenever an individual’s freedom of action is threatened or eliminated, a motivational state of reactance emerges, driving the individual to restore that freedom. Wortman and Brehm proposed that when people experience an initial loss of control, they first exhibit reactance (increased vigor, anger, active resistance); only after repeated, unequivocal demonstrations that control cannot be attained do they transition into learned helplessness (passivity, cognitive deficits, depression).

Burger and Cooper demonstrated that an individual’s position on the Desirability of Control spectrum dictates the velocity and intensity of this trajectory. High-DC individuals exhibit intense, prolonged reactance responses to control threats, resisting learned helplessness far longer than low-DC individuals, but experiencing more severe depression once helplessness is definitively established.

Validity

Extensive psychometric investigations have established the construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity of the Desirability of Control Scale across diverse experimental and naturalistic paradigms:

Construct and Experimental Validity

In their seminal validation experiments, Burger and Cooper (1979) confirmed several theoretical predictions demonstrating construct validity:

• Gambling and Illusions of Control: In laboratory gambling scenarios, high-DC participants exhibited significantly higher illusion of control than low-DC participants. When allowed to roll dice or choose their own lottery tickets, high-DC participants wagered substantially more money than when an experimenter rolled the dice or handed them a pre-selected ticket, erroneously inferring personal agency over pure chance events.
• Learned Helplessness Paradigms: Exposing participants to insolvable cognitive problems revealed that high-DC individuals displayed significantly greater persistence on subsequent solvable tasks before exhibiting performance decrements, validating their resistance to premature helplessness.
• Attributional Asymmetry: High-DC individuals consistently displayed exaggerated self-serving attributional biases, claiming disproportionate personal responsibility for successful group outcomes while vigorously identifying external interferences when outcomes were negative.

Convergent Validity

Subsequent psychometric studies have demonstrated convergent validity with conceptually allied constructs:

• Achievement Motivation: The DCS correlates moderately to strongly ($r = .35$ to $.52$) with measures of need for achievement (nAch; McClelland) and mastery orientation.
• Self-Efficacy: Positive correlations ($r = .40$ to $.55$) have been observed with Albert Bandura’s Generalized Self-Efficacy Scale, indicating that the desire to control one’s destiny often aligns with confidence in one’s execution capacity.
• Assertiveness and Dominance: DCS scores correlate positively with standardized measures of interpersonal assertiveness ($r = .42$) and social dominance on personality inventories such as the California Psychological Inventory (CPI).

Discriminant Validity

Crucially, Burger and Cooper (1979) established that the DCS measures a construct independent of existing personality metrics:

• Locus of Control: Correlations between the DCS and Rotter’s Internal-External Locus of Control Scale were nonsignificant or remarkably low (ranging from $r = -.08$ to $r = .14$), confirming that the desire for control is empirically dissociated from the generalized expectancy of control.
• Social Desirability: The DCS demonstrated minimal overlap with the Crowne-Marlowe Social Desirability Scale ($r = .09$ to $.12$, non-significant), demonstrating that responses are not distorted by impression management or need for social approval.
• General Intelligence: Scores on the DCS show near-zero correlations with standardized cognitive aptitude and intelligence tests ($r = .04$).

Reliability

The Desirability of Control Scale has demonstrated robust and stable reliability metrics across diverse clinical, undergraduate, and community populations:

Internal Consistency

In the original scale development sample ($N = 104$ undergraduate students), Burger and Cooper (1979) reported an overall Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of .80. Across subsequent empirical replications spanning over four decades, internal consistency estimates have consistently ranged between .74 and .84 across diverse demographic groups, including working adults, health-care patients, and older institutionalized populations. Split-half reliability coefficients calculated during scale development yielded values of .76 (Spearman-Brown corrected), indicating solid item homogeneity across both halves of the instrument.

Temporal Stability (Test-Retest Reliability)

Temporal stability was evaluated by administering the scale to an undergraduate cohort across a six-week interval. The resulting test-retest reliability coefficient was $r = .75$ ($p < .001$), reflecting robust longitudinal stability characteristic of an enduring personality trait rather than a fluctuating affective state. Extended longitudinal studies monitoring populations over six-month to one-year intervals have similarly yielded stability coefficients exceeding $.70$, confirming that generalized control motivation remains stable across typical life transitions.

Factor Analysis

Although Burger and Cooper originally designed the DCS as a general, unidimensional measure of personal control motivation—advocating the use of a single composite score—subsequent psychometric investigations have conducted both Exploratory Factor Analyses (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA) to elucidate its internal dimensionality.

Initial Factor Explorations

Burger and Cooper (1979) performed a principal components analysis with varimax rotation on the initial 20 items. While five factors with eigenvalues greater than 1.0 emerged, the authors noted that the first unrotated factor accounted for a substantial proportion of the total variance, and all items loaded positively onto the primary dimension. Consequently, they recommended summing all 20 items to yield an overarching composite score.

Multidimensional Models

Subsequent psychometric researchers (e.g., Gebhardt & Brosschot, 2002; Dembroski et al., 1984) identified meaningful multidimensional sub-components within the DCS:

• Factor 1: Decisional Control and Self-Determination: Encompassing items reflecting preferences for personal decision-making, autonomy in occupational tasks, and shaping one’s own destiny (e.g., Items 1, 8, 9, 12, 19).
• Factor 2: Leadership and Interpersonal Influence: Encompassing items related to directing others, preferring leadership roles over follower roles, giving orders, and active political involvement (e.g., Items 2, 4, 5, 10, 15).
• Factor 3: Avoidance of External Control / Independence: Capturing aversion to being told what to do, reluctance to submit to authority, and proactive problem intervention (e.g., Items 3, 14, 18).
• Factor 4: Relinquishing Control / Reliance on Others (Reverse-Scored): Capturing preferences for having others make decisions, manage crises, or direct daily tasks (e.g., Items 7, 16, 20).
• Factor 5: Preparatory Control and Risk Avoidance: Characterized by preventive behaviors and information gathering prior to undertaking tasks (e.g., Items 6, 13, 17).

Confirmatory Factor Analytic (CFA) investigations evaluating these alternative models have reported acceptable fit indices for both a hierarchical (second-order) model—where five first-order factors load onto a general “Desire for Control” superordinate factor—and a refined three-factor model ($\chi^2/df < 2.5$, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation [$ ext{RMSEA}$]$pprox .055$ to $.062$, Comparative Fit Index [$ ext{CFI}$]$pprox .91$ to $.94$). However, in the vast majority of social, health, and experimental psychological studies, researchers continue to utilize the total composite score, reflecting Burger’s original conceptualization of DC as a generalized motivational orientation.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Desirability of Control Scale (DCS)
• Authors: Jerry M. Burger, Ph.D., & Harris M. Cooper, Ph.D. (1979)
• Instrument Type: Self-report personality assessment
• Format: Paper-and-pencil or computerized questionnaire
• Number of Items: 20 items
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert-type scale defined as follows:
  • 1 = The statement does not apply to me at all
  • 2 = The statement usually does not apply to me
  • 3 = Most often, the statement does not apply
  • 4 = I am unsure about whether or not the statement applies to me, or it applies to me about half the time
  • 5 = The statement applies more often than not
  • 6 = The statement usually applies to me
  • 7 = The statement always applies to me
• Administration Time: Approximately 5 to 10 minutes
• Target Population: Adults and adolescents (ages 16 and older)
• Scoring Instructions:
  • Reverse-Scored Items: Five items are framed in a reverse direction and must be reverse-coded prior to calculation: Item 7, Item 10, Item 16, Item 19, and Item 20. For these items, convert values as follows: $1
    ightarrow 7$, $2
    ightarrow 6$, $3
    ightarrow 5$, $4
    ightarrow 4$, $5
    ightarrow 3$, $6
    ightarrow 2$, $7
    ightarrow 1$ (or using the formula: $ ext{Reversed Score} = 8 – ext{Raw Score}$).
  • Total Score Calculation: Sum the scores of all 20 items (including the 5 reverse-scored items).
  • Possible Score Range: Scores range from 20 to 140.
  • Score Interpretation: Higher total scores reflect a stronger trait motivation to exert personal control over events and decisions. Typical normative samples from non-clinical university and adult populations exhibit a mean total score of approximately 98 to 102 with a standard deviation of approximately 11 to 14. Scores above 115 are conventionally categorized as High DC, whereas scores below 85 are categorized as Low DC.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Desirability of Control Scale was published in 1979 in the journal Motivation and Emotion (Springer / Plenum Publishing Corporation). Under standard psychometric and academic research conventions, the instrument is in the public domain for non-commercial educational and empirical research purposes, provided proper academic attribution is credited to the original authors (Burger & Cooper, 1979). No royalty or licensing fee is required for academic investigations, student dissertations, or classroom demonstrations. However, commercial utilization, integration into proprietary diagnostic software, or corporate pre-employment testing batteries may require formal permission from the copyright holder (Springer Nature / Plenum Publishing).

References

• Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191
• Burger, J. M. (1984). Desire for control, locus of control, and proneness to depression. Journal of Personality, 52(1), 71–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1984.tb00346.x
• Burger, J. M. (1986). Desire for control and the illusion of control: The effects of familiarity and choice. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 7(2), 143–152. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15324834basp0702_5
• Burger, J. M. (1992). Desire for control: Personality, social, and clinical perspectives. Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0708-0
• Burger, J. M., & Cooper, H. M. (1979). The desirability of control. Motivation and Emotion, 3(4), 381–393. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00994052
• Crowne, D. P., & Marlowe, D. (1960). A new scale of social desirability independent of psychopathology. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 24(4), 349–354. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0047358
• deCharms, R. (1968). Personal causation: The internal affective determinants of behavior. Academic Press.
• Gebhardt, W. A., & Brosschot, J. F. (2002). Desirability of control: Psychometric properties and relationships with locus of control, personality, coping, and distress. European Journal of Personality, 16(6), 423–438. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.463
• Langer, E. J. (1975). The illusion of control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32(2), 311–328. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.32.2.311
• Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0092976
• Seligman, M. E. (1975). Helplessness: On depression, development, and death. W. H. Freeman.
• White, R. W. (1959). Motivation reconsidered: The concept of competence. Psychological Review, 66(5), 297–333. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040934
• Wortman, C. B., & Brehm, J. W. (1975). Responses to uncontrollable outcomes: An integration of reactance theory and the learned helplessness model. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 8, pp. 277–336). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60253-1

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)