It was hypothesized that true externals and those who adopt an external locus of control as a defense differ in the amount of personal responsibility they accept for task outcomes. Defensive externals varied in their causal attributions as a function of task outcome, whereas nondefensive externals did not. (Editor/SJL)

Subjects with internal or external locus of control were instructed to remeber as much as possible from an array of letter strings generated from a finite state grammar. While both groups attended to the exemplars, internals extracted more invariance and hence learned more about the underlying grammatical structure. (Author/SJL)