Healthy Habits: The Connection between Diet, Exercise, and Locus of Control
By D. Cobb-Clark, Sonja C. Kassenboehmer, S. Schurer. Social Science Research Network, 2014
312 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper analyzes the relationship between individuals' locus of control and their decisions to exercise regularly, eat well, drink moderately, and avoid tobacco. Our primary goal is to assess the relative importance of the alternative pathways that potentially link locus of control to healthy habits. We find that individuals with an internal locus of control are more likely to eat well and exercise regularly. This link cannot be explained by the extent to which they are future-orientated and value their health, however. There are important gender differences in explaining the link between perceptions of control and healthy habits. Men with an internal locus of control expect to have higher health returns to their investments in diet and exercise. In contrast, women with an internal locus of control maintain healthy habits because they derive greater satisfaction from those activities than women with external control tendencies.
Subfields: Applied Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0bc54291aac3474be965715520d24b887c2c0db6
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In Applied Psychology
In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Locus of Control and Savings (2016, methodology): “[Insert Figure 1 here] We use factor analysis to construct an overall index measuring locus of control (see Piatek & Pinger, 2010; Cobb-Clark et al., 2014).”
- Locus of control and the labor market (2015, unknown): “(6)Cobb-Clark and Schurer (2013) study changes in locus of control over time.”