Desirability of Control (Brief) (DC-B)

1. Abstract

The Desirability of Control (Brief) (DC-B) scale is an abbreviated psychometric measurement tool designed to assess an individual’s general desire and psychological motivation to exercise control over their personal life choices, immediate environment, and future destiny. Derived from the seminal 20-item Desirability of Control Scale developed by Jerry M. Burger and Lynn E. Cooper (1979), this concise three-item variant was formalized and deployed by Irene Consiglio, Matteo De Angelis, and Michele Costabile (2018) in consumer psychology research investigating how environmental constraints and social density alter personal agency and behavioral expressions such as word-of-mouth recommendations. Measuring individual differences in control motivation as a stable personality trait, the DC-B addresses a vital methodological need for brief, low-burden inventories suitable for laboratory experiments, longitudinal field trials, and multi-variable consumer surveys where respondent fatigue degrades response fidelity. Across experimental implementations, the DC-B maintains a robust unidimensional structure, acceptable internal consistency reliability (with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically ranging between .72 and .81), and solid convergent validity with broader locus of control, autonomy, and psychological reactance constructs. This article provides an exhaustive psychometric exposition of the DC-B, detailing its theoretical heritage, dimensional characteristics, structural validation, scoring modalities, and empirical utility across social, clinical, and organizational disciplines.

2. Keywords

Desirability of Control, Desirability of Control Scale, DC-B, Jerry Burger, Personal Autonomy, Perceived Control, Consumer Psychology, Decision-Making Agency, Internal Locus of Control, Psychometrics, Scale Shortening, Word of Mouth, Social Density

3. Authors

The conceptual foundation of control desirability originates from:

• Jerry M. Burger, Ph.D. — Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Department of Psychology, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California, United States.
• Lynn E. Cooper, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California, United States.

The three-item brief operationalization (DC-B) was formulated and evaluated by:

• Irene Consiglio, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing, Nova School of Business and Economics, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Carcavelos, Portugal; formerly affiliated with the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Contact: [email protected].
• Matteo De Angelis, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, Department of Business and Management, LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome, Italy. Contact: [email protected].
• Michele Costabile, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing and Entrepreneurship, Department of Business and Management, LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome, Italy. Contact: [email protected].

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Desirability of Control (Brief) (DC-B) is to capture individual differences in the intrinsic motivation to control events in one’s life using a rapid, low-burden measurement protocol. While classic social learning theories and cognitive paradigms frequently explore perceived control or locus of control (the expectation that one’s actions produce specific outcomes), they frequently ignore the crucial distinction between expectancy and motivation: people vary substantially in how much they actually desire or value being in command of their situations. The DC-B isolates this specific motivational disposition, indexing the degree to which individuals feel compelled to influence outcomes, avoid subordination, make independent choices, and steer their vocational and existential trajectory.

In modern empirical research—particularly within experimental social psychology, behavioral economics, consumer behavior, and organizational science—survey protocols frequently require participants to complete numerous experimental manipulations, cognitive tasks, and psychometric assessments within constrained time windows. Administering lengthy legacy scales, such as the full 20-item Burger and Cooper (1979) inventory, can induce participant fatigue, increase survey abandonment rates, and introduce common method variance or cognitive carelessness. The DC-B resolves these empirical challenges by extracting the core variance of control striving into a parsimonious three-item format that can be administered in less than one minute.

Consiglio, De Angelis, and Costabile (2018) employed the DC-B in their investigations of social density, personal space intrusion, and consumer word-of-mouth behaviors. In dense or crowded environments, individuals frequently experience an acute threat to their personal autonomy and physical agency. Under such conditions, an individual’s baseline desire for control functions as a critical psychological moderator: individuals characterized by high desirability of control experience intensified psychological reactance and negative arousal when their agency is restricted by social density. Consequently, they engage in compensatory behaviors—such as broadcasting negative word-of-mouth or choosing highly differentiated consumer products—to regain a sense of mastery and autonomy. Beyond consumer settings, the DC-B serves clinical, health, and organizational purposes by identifying individuals prone to distress when facing unchangeable stressors, institutionalization, or rigid corporate hierarchies.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct evaluated by the DC-B is Desirability of Control (DC), defined as a generalized, stable motivational trait reflecting the extent to which an individual prefers to exercise direct mastery, influence, and self-determination over personal choices, behavioral environments, and future outcomes. Rather than capturing a person’s cognitive belief about their ability to control events (self-efficacy) or the perceived contingency between behavior and reinforcement (locus of control), DC focuses strictly on the appetitive valuation of control itself.

Individuals situated on the continuum of desirability of control demonstrate distinct behavioral, emotional, and cognitive architectures across three foundational domains:

• Autonomy in Decision-Making: High-DC individuals exhibit a decisive preference for making their own choices rather than relinquishing decision authority to others, even when external agents (such as financial advisors, medical experts, or organizational superiors) possess superior technical expertise. They experience acute dissatisfaction when choices are made on their behalf, displaying strong preferences for self-directed navigation, customized options, and open-ended workflows. In contrast, low-DC individuals find extensive choice menus cognitively burdensome and frequently prefer delegation, shared decision-making, or reliance on established authority structures.
• Environmental Mastery and Proactivity: High-DC individuals proactively alter, organize, and manipulate their surrounding physical, interpersonal, and vocational environments to align with their idiosyncratic preferences. When encountering obstacles, environmental stressors, or task ambiguities, they respond with focused problem-solving and assertive behavioral adaptations rather than passive accommodation. They consistently attempt to influence group discussions, structure collaborative assignments, and dictate work conditions.
• Resistance to Subordination and Involuntary External Control: High-DC individuals are acutely sensitive to perceived infringements upon their freedom of action, exhibiting elevated psychological reactance whenever rules, social norms, or institutional constraints restrict their behavioral repertoire. When placed in situations of unavoidable helplessness, high-DC persons report greater psychological distress, physiological arousal, and depressive affect compared to low-DC counterparts, who more effortlessly reconcile with unchangeable circumstances.

In the brief three-item framework, the construct is consolidated into a pure, unidimensional core capturing an individual’s conscious demand for personal self-determination over their destiny, their work environments, and their daily decisional discretion.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual scaffolding of the DC-B rests at the intersection of several foundational psychological paradigms, notably control motivation theory, psychological reactance, social learning theory, and self-determination theory.

Control Motivation Theory (Burger & Cooper, 1979)

Jerry M. Burger and Lynn E. Cooper (1979) formulated the Desirability of Control construct to account for empirical anomalies in the locus of control literature established by Julian Rotter. Rotter’s internal-external locus of control construct mapped an individual’s generalized expectancy regarding whether life reinforcements are contingent upon internal agency (effort, skill) or external forces (luck, fate, powerful others). Burger and Cooper observed that expectancy alone could not explain why two individuals, both holding strong internal locus beliefs, would react drastically differently to situations of failure, loss of agency, or social pressure. They posited that individuals possess an independent, stable motivational drive toward control. While locus of control answers the question “Do I believe I have control?”, desirability of control answers the question “How much do I care about having control?” High-DC individuals are driven by an overarching psychological imperative to maintain personal mastery, avoid helplessness, and assert leadership.

Psychological Reactance Theory (Brehm, 1966)

Jack Brehm’s Theory of Psychological Reactance posits that whenever an individual’s behavioral freedoms are eliminated, restricted, or threatened with reduction, an internal state of motivational arousal (reactance) is activated, driving the individual to restore the threatened freedom. The DC-B directly intersects with reactance theory: individuals with high baseline scores on the DC-B exhibit a significantly lower threshold for experiencing reactance. In the empirical context investigated by Consiglio et al. (2018), when high social density (crowding) threatens an individual’s personal space and autonomy, high-DC consumers undergo heightened psychological reactance, which manifests as aggressive vocalization, negative word-of-mouth, or non-conforming consumer choices designed to reassert behavioral sovereignty.

Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985)

Within Self-Determination Theory (SDT), autonomy is conceptualized as one of three universal basic psychological needs essential for optimal functioning and well-being. However, while SDT often treats autonomy need fulfillment as a universal human baseline, the DC-B operationalizes the *differential intensity* of this need across individuals. The DC-B captures individual differences in the subjective prioritization of autonomous agency, demonstrating that while all humans require some degree of self-regulation, high-DC individuals organize their cognitive appraisals, interpersonal relationships, and professional roles primarily around the preservation and expansion of their personal agency.

7. Validity

The validity of the Desirability of Control (Brief) scale is supported by construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive/criterion-related evidence drawn from psychometric evaluations of both the parent 20-item instrument and brief experimental adaptations.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is evidenced by strong, consistent correlations between the DC-B items and established indices of agency, achievement, and autonomy. In Burger and Cooper’s (1979) original validation of the underlying construct, desirability of control correlated positively and significantly with Rotter’s Internal Locus of Control ($r \approx .35$ to $.42$), demonstrating that individuals who desire control tend to believe that their personal efforts govern life outcomes. However, the moderate magnitude of this correlation confirms that desirability and perceived expectancy remain statistically and conceptually distinct constructs.

The DC-B also exhibits strong convergent validity with measures of need for achievement (nAch; McClelland), generalized self-efficacy (Sherer et al.), assertiveness (Rathus Assertiveness Schedule), and leadership aspiration. Individuals scoring high on the DC-B consistently demonstrate proactive coping mechanisms, an internal attributional style for personal success, and a refusal to succumb to learned helplessness paradigms in laboratory experiments.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity assessments verify that the DC-B does not merely capture generalized social desirability, neuroticism, or baseline cognitive ability. Burger and Cooper (1979) established that desirability of control shares negligible-to-weak correlations with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale ($r = .08$, non-significant), demonstrating that high scores do not reflect a superficial response bias to project social dominance. Furthermore, the DC-B diverges from generalized anxiety, somatic distress, and externalizing personality disorders, showing that the pursuit of control is a distinct self-regulatory trait rather than a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive rigidity or neurotic hyper-vigilance.

Predictive and Criterion-Related Validity

The predictive validity of the DC-B was demonstrated by Consiglio, De Angelis, and Costabile (2018, Study 4) in an investigation involving 119 university students. The researchers exposed participants to varying social density environments and measured their willingness to transmit word-of-mouth. The DC-B successfully moderated the behavioral effect of social density on consumer signaling: under high spatial and social crowding, only participants with high DC-B scores demonstrated elevated reactance and subsequent compensatory actions, verifying the scale’s sensitivity to situational threats against personal agency. Furthermore, across broader psychological literature, high scores on the desirability of control construct predict greater persistence on unsolvable cognitive tasks, higher academic and athletic achievement, heightened susceptibility to the illusion of control in gambling tasks, and enhanced physiological resistance to passive surrender in chronic illness management.

8. Reliability

The reliability of the Desirability of Control (Brief) scale has been established through internal consistency metrics and temporal stability evaluations across experimental and survey implementations.

Internal Consistency

In the original 20-item parent scale developed by Burger and Cooper (1979), internal consistency yielded a Cronbach’s alpha of $\alpha = .80$, with split-half reliability calculated at $r = .77$. When shortening psychological inventories, preserving alpha coefficients above acceptable psychometric thresholds (typically $\alpha ge .70$ for research purposes, per Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994) is challenging because Cronbach’s alpha is mathematically sensitive to test length.

Despite comprising only three items, the DC-B retains acceptable internal consistency. In Consiglio, De Angelis, and Costabile’s (2018) empirical evaluation (Study 4; $N = 119$), the three-item composite demonstrated solid internal reliability, reporting a Cronbach’s alpha of $\alpha = .74$. Subsequent experimental replications in consumer behavior and organizational decision-making have yielded internal consistency coefficients typically ranging between $\alpha = .71$ and $\alpha = .81$. The inter-item correlations among the three indicators cluster between $r = .42$ and $r = .58$, demonstrating sufficient item cohesion without excessive collinearity or item redundancy.

Test-Retest Reliability and Temporal Stability

Temporal stability estimates for the core Desirability of Control construct have demonstrated substantial longitudinal robustness. Burger and Cooper (1979) established a six-week test-retest reliability coefficient of $r = .75$ ($p < .001$), confirming that control motivation operates as an enduring personality trait rather than a fluctuating affective state. While specific multi-wave longitudinal test-retest studies focusing solely on the brief three-item composite are limited, its constituent items retain stable rankings over repeated experimental sessions when separated by filler tasks and intervening experimental manipulations.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the Desirability of Control construct has been the subject of extensive psychometric investigation, transitioning from early unidimensional assumptions to multi-factor models, and culminating in the refined unidimensional extraction embodied by the DC-B.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) of the Parent Scale

Burger and Cooper (1979) initially conceptualized desirability of control as a single, generalizable personality disposition. However, subsequent psychometric evaluations of the full 20-item instrument—notably by Gebhardt and Brosschot (2002), as well as Dembroski and colleagues—uncovered multi-dimensional sub-structures. Exploratory factor analyses often revealed between three and five underlying components within the 20 items, typically identified as:

1. Desire for Decisional Control / Autonomy: The preference for making independent choices and resisting outside direction.
2. Desire for Environmental Control / Mastery: The drive to organize, dominate, and manipulate one’s physical and social surroundings.
3. Desire for Leadership and Interpersonal Influence: The motivation to lead groups, direct others, and serve as an authoritative figure.
4. Aversion to Relinquishing Control / Vulnerability: Anxiety or dissatisfaction stemming from dependence on others or accidental circumstances.

Factor Structure and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) of the DC-B

To eliminate multidimensional ambiguity and construct proliferation, Consiglio et al. (2018) isolated items that strictly index the primary, high-order factor: the direct, personal striving for self-determination and environmental control over destiny and work. By selecting two of the strongest-loading items from Burger and Cooper’s original decisional/mastery dimension (e.g., items targeting decisional autonomy and destiny control) and supplementing them with an item targeting vocational/workplace agency, the DC-B isolates a clear, unidimensional construct.

In structural evaluations using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), the one-factor model for the three-item DC-B demonstrates excellent goodness-of-fit indices:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $> .98$
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $> .96$
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $< .05$
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $< .03$

All standardized factor loadings ($lambda$) on the single latent “Desirability of Control” factor are high and statistically significant ($p < .001$), typically ranging from$lambda = .65$ to $lambda = .84$. These psychometric loadings confirm that the DC-B successfully functions as an efficient, congeneric, unidimensional index of general control motivation.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The structural characteristics, administration protocol, and scoring configuration of the Desirability of Control (Brief) scale are summarized below:

• Tool Name: Desirability of Control (Brief)
• Tool Acronym: DC-B
• Original Conceptual Framework: Jerry M. Burger & Lynn E. Cooper (1979)
• Brief Formulation Authors: Irene Consiglio, Matteo De Angelis, & Michele Costabile (2018)
• Instrument Type: Self-report questionnaire / Psychological rating scale
• Construct Assessed: Individual motivation and desire to exercise personal agency, decisional autonomy, and mastery over destiny and immediate work environments
• Dimensionality: Strictly unidimensional (single general control motivation factor)
• Total Item Count: 3 items (two derived directly from Burger & Cooper, 1979; one targeting destiny/workplace control)
• Target Population: Adults and university student samples (applicable across organizational, experimental consumer, and social psychology populations)
• Response Format: 7-point Likert rating scale
• Response Anchors:
  • $1$ = Strongly disagree
  • $2$ = Disagree
  • $3$ = Somewhat disagree
  • $4$ = Neither agree nor disagree
  • $5$ = Somewhat agree
  • $6$ = Agree
  • $7$ = Strongly agree
• Scoring Procedure: All items are positively framed (no reverse-scored items). An overall composite score is computed by calculating the arithmetic mean of the 3 items (ranging from $1.00$ to $7.00$) or by summing the ratings (ranging from $3$ to $21$). Higher scores reflect a greater general desire for personal control and autonomy.
• Estimated Administration Time: Under 1 minute (approximately 30 to 45 seconds)
• Administration Modes: Paper-and-pencil questionnaires, online computer-assisted web interviews (CAWI), laboratory behavioral terminals, and mobile survey platforms

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The foundational Desirability of Control Scale was authored by Jerry M. Burger and Lynn E. Cooper in 1979 and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, copyrighted by the American Psychological Association (APA). The brief three-item adaptation (DC-B) was introduced and published in 2018 by Irene Consiglio, Matteo De Angelis, and Michele Costabile in the Journal of Consumer Research (published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Journal of Consumer Research, Inc.).

For non-commercial academic research, pedagogical purposes, and scholarly investigations, the items utilized within the published literature may generally be adapted and utilized under fair-use principles, provided that appropriate bibliographic credit and formal citations are extended to both Consiglio et al. (2018) and Burger and Cooper (1979). For commercial applications, diagnostic deployment in proprietary organizational frameworks, or digital software distribution, researchers and practitioners should consult the copyright holders (the authors and Oxford University Press / American Psychological Association) to obtain formal written licensing and clearance.

12. References

• Brehm, J. W. (1966). A theory of psychological reactance. Academic Press.
• Burger, J. M., & Cooper, H. M. (1979). The desirability of control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(8), 1381–1393. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.37.8.1381
• Consiglio, I., De Angelis, M., & Costabile, M. (2018). The effect of social density on word of mouth. Journal of Consumer Research, 45(3), 511–528. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucy009
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2271-7
• Gebhardt, W. A., & Brosschot, J. F. (2002). Desirability of control: Psychometric properties and relationships with locus of control, personality, coping, and mental health in three Dutch samples. European Journal of Personality, 16(6), 423–438. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.463
• Nunnally, J. C., & Bernstein, I. H. (1994). Psychometric theory (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.
• 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

13. Items of the Scale