🍄 Locus Unknown

The Pulse Behind Your Inner Steering Wheel

May 02, 2025

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In Futureland, we wander through the looking glass of the psyche, past the tangled roots of personal agency, and into the quantum terrain of control. In this space, the compass doesn’t point north—it points inward. We’re exploring an existential question: Where do we believe control over our lives resides? Inside us? Outside us? All around us like a diffuse cloud of algorithms, economics, and cultural conditioning? That place—that locus—might be the most powerful quiet force shaping our societies, our mental health, our technologies, and our future planetary direction. Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander.

Let it be?

“Towards the end of The Beatles’ illustrious but brief career, Paul McCartney wrote ‘Let it Be,’ a song about finding peace by letting events take their natural course,” writes Upworthy. “It was a sentiment that seemed to mirror the feeling of resignation the band had with its imminent demise. The bittersweet song has had an appeal that has lasted generations and that may be because it reflects an essential psychological concept: the locus of control.”

Locus of control is the extent to which you feel you have control over the outcome of events that impact your life. It’s a concept developed by psychologist Julian Rotter, who in 1966 published a scale designed to measure and assess external and internal locus of control. Your “locus” (plural “loci”, Latin for “place” or “location”) is conceptualized as internal (a belief that one can control one’s own life) or external (a belief that life is controlled by outside factors which the person can not influence; or that chance or fate control their lives.)

“Locus of control (LOC) reflects “how much we expect our own behavior to affect what happens to us—rather than luck, fate, chance, or powerful others,” writes Stephen Nowicki, the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Emory University, for Psychology Today. “The more we believe that our behavior has something to do with our outcomes, the more ‘internal’ we are. In contrast, the more we believe outside forces determine what happens to us the more ‘external’ we are.”

Nowicki, who has served as Director of Clinical Training and Head of the Psychological Center at Emory University, says that locus of control is one of the “most significant concepts in the history of personality psychology,” and that Rotter’s 1966 article introducing it to the psychological community “has been cited over 43,000 times.”

Why It Matters Now

Our world—social inequality, digitally accelerated, environmentally destabilized—is drifting toward externality. We're scoring higher on “the world is happening to me,” and lower on “I can shape it.” Gen Z, born into cascading crises and endless information, is exhibiting higher levels of anxiety, depression, and external locus. Even Rotter’s original scale, when applied today, shows college students scoring more externally than prison inmates in 1966. That’s not fiction. That’s a signal.

And it matters because people with external locus are less likely to act—on health, on climate, on community. It’s not that they don’t care—it’s that they don’t believe their actions matter.

What if the real human crisis is a crisis of agency?

Control: A Planetary Emotion

Control isn’t just psychological—it’s planetary. During COVID-19, people with internal locus were more likely to follow health protocols. In climate studies, they were more likely to take action. Even in aging research, greater control was linked to longer lives. There’s a biological switch for this: the locus coeruleus, a tiny blue nucleus in the brainstem, regulating attention, arousal, and readiness. It’s the neural gearbox. Trainable. Responsive. Tuned by how we perceive control. Which brings us to the real magic: perceived control changes outcomes. Even illusions of control (like astrology or superstitions) offer emotional scaffolding in chaotic times.

That’s not delusion—it’s design.

CultureWatch: From Control to Co-Creation

Why does this matter for culture, companies, and leadership? Because we are designing worlds—products, systems, AI interfaces, education, urban spaces—without asking:

“What kind of locus of control does this cultivate?”

Does your app give users more agency or more surveillance?
Does your campaign frame consumers as passive recipients or co-creators of meaning?
Does your leadership model enable participation or breed dependence?

The answers shape not just engagement, but trust, resilience, and collective action. And the future isn’t asking for more control. It’s asking for collaborative authorship.

Business Takeaway: Agency is the New Urgency

For strategists, designers, policymakers, and brand leaders, the locus of control isn’t a psychology footnote—it’s a strategic North Star.

Internally-tilted cultures are more likely to:

Adopt sustainable practices
Recover from setbacks
Innovate with conviction
Engage with purpose-driven brands

And here’s the quiet risk: if your audience feels increasingly externalized by tech, inequity, or misinformation, and your brand offers no meaningful role in shaping the world—they will withdraw.

Agency isn’t just empowerment—it’s retention.

How to Move the Needle (Gently)

Design for Autonomy: Build systems that adapt to individual goals, not just drive engagement.
Frame Participation: Invite people to shape outcomes—from co-creation platforms to community storytelling.
Narrate Responsibility with Compassion: Internal locus should not become moral superiority. Acknowledge systems. Invite shared agency.
Teach Control Literacy: Especially to youth. Not as a bootstraps myth, but as a dialogue between self and system.

Final Coordinates

To navigate the future, we must all become locus shifters—practicing the delicate art of knowing when to act, when to adapt, and when to imagine a better gear. Because the real plot twist of Futureland? Agency is regenerative. It’s the soil from which mental health, sustainable behavior, and new myths grow. In an era of social, environmental and economic tipping points coupled with AI acceleration, the question is not just what we can control—but how we can cultivate collective control over the narratives that shape tomorrow.

And so Alice asks:
"Where does your locus lie? And more importantly—who’s writing the next chapter?"

What else we are wandering…

💬 Beyond the headlines
Stanford scientists are exploring “agentic social media use,” which emphasizes engaging with platforms intentionally—using them with purpose, knowledge, and control rather than mindlessly. This approach includes using social media to build relationships, learn new things, or simply relax and entertain oneself—activities that, while not always deemed “productive,” are still deliberate and meaningful. It involves adopting an agentic mindset, developing digital literacy, and practicing control over one’s feed and algorithmic recommendations. By viewing social media through the lens of agency, we can better understand its varied effects and discover new ways to use it beneficially. (via Frontiers )

🧠 Control settings
Deep in your brain lies the locus coeruleus, a tiny, lapis-colored cluster of neurons often called the brain’s “master switch”—or better yet, its gearbox. This structure regulates your mental state, affecting focus, creativity, learning, and alertness. When it's in the right "gear," you're mentally dialed in; in the wrong one, you drift or spiral. Excitingly, research now shows this switch is trainable. With specific techniques, you can shift your brain’s gears, enhancing cognition and emotional balance in real time. (via New Scientist.)

🌠 Locus pocus?
There was an astrology boom in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, reports Verywellmind, and it could have been used as a coping mechanism. “Research suggests that it helps people make sense of things during times when life feels complex.Astrology becomes a tool that can be turned to for comfort.History shows that people have been more interested in astrology during tumultuous times, with interest rising during the Great Depression in the 1930s as well as in Germany between the two world wars.” Why does astrology peak during tough times? “Because so many of the traditional institutions have failed to provide a meaning map for people,” Jennifer Freed, PhD, a psychologist and astrologist tells Verywellmind. “Also, astrology, unlike those institutions, has been a place of welcoming for all people.” The article states that astrology may appeal to those who perceive an external locus of control. “Someone with an external locus of control will credit outside forces for both the good and the bad, blaming those forces if something goes wrong and crediting luck for success. Therefore, astrology can be appealing to them because they believe it can give them a hit of good luck that might bolster them to seek other forms of internal reinforcement. It might also be that it is an illusion of control.”

🧠 Psychology of superstition
”What are the psychological processes that are going on when people develop superstitions and make these behaviors part of their lives?” asks Kim I. Mills, senior director of strategic external communications and public affairs for the American Psychological Association, on the Speaking of Psychology podcast in an interview with Stuart Vyse, PhD, author of the book Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition. “There are very few instances where if you have complete control and you know what's going to happen, then you employ a superstition—it's very rare. Even if the outcome is very important, it's only in those circumstances where you can't be certain of the outcome that a superstition comes about. So control is very big,” replies Vyse.

🧭 Do you have an external or internal locus of control? (a simple test)
Are you an innie or an outie? (Severance pun intended.) Where does your locus of control lie? Read through the statements below and select the set (Outlook 1 or Outlook 2) that best describes your outlook on life.

Outlook 1:
• I often feel that I have little control over my life and what happens to me.
• People rarely get what they deserve.
• It isn't worth setting goals or making plans because too many things can happen that are outside of my control.
• Life is a game of chance.
• Individuals have little influence over the events of the world.

If the statements above best reflect your view on life, then you probably tend to have an external locus of control.

Outlook 2:
• If you work hard and commit yourself to a goal, you can achieve anything.
• There is no such thing as fate or destiny.
• If you study hard and are well-prepared, you can do well on exams.
• Luck has little to do with success; it's mostly a matter of dedication and effort.
• In the long run, people tend to get what they deserve in life.

If the statements above best reflect your outlook on life, then you most likely have an internal locus of control. (via Verywellmind)

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