Desire for Control Scale (DCS)

1. Abstract

The Desire for Control Scale (DCS), originally conceptualized and psychometrically validated by Jerry M. Burger and Harris M. Cooper in 1979, serves as the preeminent psychometric instrument designed to assess individual differences in the general desire for personal control over life events. Grounded in social learning theory, humanistic psychology, and motivational science, the construct of desire for control reflects an enduring, dispositional motivation to exercise mastery, autonomy, and decision-making power over one’s immediate environment and behavioral outcomes. The scale comprises 20 self-report statements evaluated on a 7-point Likert response scale, anchored from 1 (This statement doesn’t apply to me at all) to 7 (This statement always applies to me). Psychometric evaluations across multiple heterogeneous samples aggregating over 2,000 participants establish robust internal consistency reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients routinely falling between 0.76 and 0.80, alongside a notable two-week test-retest reliability coefficient of r = 0.75. The instrument demonstrates robust convergent validity through meaningful positive associations with the Type A behavior pattern, internal locus of control, and McClelland’s need for power, while concurrently maintaining established discriminant validity from self-esteem, self-monitoring, and social desirability response biases. Structural investigations reveal a multidimensional latent architecture subsuming leadership preference, decisiveness, independence, and aversion to external control, though the scale is frequently utilized as a parsimonious unidimensional global composite. Elevated scores on the DCS empirically predict a broad spectrum of cognitive, affective, and behavioral phenomena, including active coping strategies under acute stressors, enhanced pre-decisional information search, heightened resistance to persuasion, and marked psychological reactance. This comprehensive psychometric review explores the development, factorial structural integrity, clinical utility, and multidisciplinary applications of the DCS across personality psychology, organizational behavior, consumer research, and behavioral medicine.

2. Keywords

Desire for Control Scale, Jerry Burger, personal control, psychological reactance, internal locus of control, autonomy, decision-making, need for power, psychometrics, consumer behavior, coping mechanisms, self-determination

3. Authors

The Desire for Control Scale was developed by Jerry M. Burger and Harris M. Cooper, whose collaborative work originated at the Department of Psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Jerry M. Burger, who subsequently served as an emeritus professor of psychology at Santa Clara University in California, is an internationally recognized scholar in social and personality psychology, widely celebrated for his empirical investigations into personal control, obedience, compliance, and social influence paradigms. His research programs have extensively explored how the fundamental motivation to control one’s environment governs human vulnerability to authority, attributional tendencies, and psychological well-being. Harris M. Cooper, who later transitioned to Duke University as the Hugo L. Blomquist Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, is an eminent authority in research synthesis methods, meta-analysis, social psychology, and educational policy. Inquiries regarding the development, historical datasets, and psychometric utilization of the scale are typically addressed through Jerry M. Burger’s academic archives at Santa Clara University.

4. Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Desire for Control Scale is to operationalize and quantify the extent to which an individual is intrinsically motivated to exert mastery, command, and influence over behavioral trajectories, situational contexts, and environmental contingencies. Prior to the seminal contribution of Burger and Cooper in 1979, psychological inquiry into perceived control was predominantly dominated by expectancy-based constructs, notably Julian B. Rotter’s locus of control paradigm. However, Burger and Cooper identified a critical theoretical conflation within contemporary personality research: the belief that one possesses the ability to obtain reinforcement (expectancy of control) is conceptually and functionally distinct from the degree to which an individual actively wants, desires, or demands such control (motivational value of control). Consequently, the DCS was engineered to fill this psychometric void, offering an exact instrument to capture individual variations along this motivational axis.

In clinical and health psychology domains, the scale serves as a crucial diagnostic and prognostic tool. Individuals exhibiting high levels of desire for control (high DC) frequently exhibit proactive health behaviors, such as adhering rigorously to preventative medical regimens, actively seeking secondary medical opinions, and meticulously managing chronic health conditions such as diabetes or cardiovascular disorders. Conversely, when such individuals are confronted with genuinely uncontrollable clinical stressors—such as terminal diagnoses, invasive inpatient hospital procedures, or institutionalization—their unyielding need for personal agency can paradoxically precipitate heightened acute anxiety, severe psychological distress, depressive symptomatology, or non-compliance with palliative protocols. In therapeutic contexts, understanding a client’s baseline desire for control empowers clinicians to tailor cognitive-behavioral and acceptance-based interventions, guiding high-DC individuals to differentiate between modifiable and non-modifiable life stressors (the classic primary versus secondary control paradigm).

Within organizational and industrial psychology, the DCS demonstrates profound utility in personnel selection, leadership development, job crafting, and workplace stress assessment. High-DC individuals naturally gravitate toward autonomous occupational roles, managerial posts, and entrepreneurial ventures. They thrive in decentralized corporate environments characterized by high decision-latitude, yet they often experience severe friction, burnout, and counterproductive work behaviors when subjected to micromanagement, rigid bureaucratic hierarchies, or authoritarian leadership structures. Conversely, individuals with a low desire for control (low DC) exhibit distinct comfort in structured, directive environments where operational responsibilities and risk-bearing decisions are deferred to superiors or group consensus.

Furthermore, the DCS has garnered widespread adoption within consumer psychology, marketing research, and human-computer interaction. It functions as a powerful moderating variable explaining why certain consumers fiercely resist aggressive, high-pressure sales tactics and deceptive advertising, demanding customizable product configurations and self-directed transactional interfaces. In digital environments, DCS variations systematically predict user preferences for customizable algorithmic feeds, privacy settings, and autonomous user experience architectures versus automated, passive default settings.

5. Psychological Construct

The primary construct measured by the DCS is desire for control, formally defined as an enduring, generalized personality trait that reflects the motivational valuation placed on possessing command, autonomy, and decision-making power over life outcomes and immediate environmental circumstances. This construct is neither purely affective nor exclusively cognitive; rather, it constitutes an integrated motivational-behavioral orientation characterized by specific cognitive heuristics, emotional vulnerabilities, and behavioral patterns.

High desire-for-control individuals view the world through an agentic lens. They operate under the persistent imperative that environmental outcomes should, and must, be shaped by personal agency rather than external forces such as chance, fate, luck, or powerful others. At a cognitive level, high-DC persons exhibit strong internal attributional patterns: when performing tasks, they systematically attribute both successes and failures to their own competence, effort, and strategic execution. Moreover, they display pronounced illusions of control in ambiguous or probabilistic scenarios, often overestimating their ability to influence chance-determined outcomes (such as lotteries, card games, or volatile financial markets). In contrast, low desire-for-control individuals are marked by an absence of this agentic imperative. They frequently prefer having decisions made on their behalf, experiencing heightened psychological comfort when expert figures, established organizational hierarchies, or collective social bodies shoulder the burdens of responsibility, uncertainty, and cognitive overhead.

Although Burger and Cooper originally treated the DCS as a unified unidimensional index of general control motivation, subsequent psychometric and construct-validation investigations (such as those by Gebhardt and Brosschot, as well as Burger himself) have delineated several interrelated behavioral dimensions comprising the overarching construct:

• Leadership and Social Dominance: The inclination to steer group directions, accept command roles, and exercise interpersonal influence rather than adopting subordinate or follower orientations (exemplified by items such as “I would prefer to be a leader rather than a follower” and “When it comes to orders, I would rather give them than receive them”).
• Decisional Autonomy and Self-Reliance: An aversion to having choices restricted or imposed by external agents, coupled with a deep preference for self-guided determination (captured by items like “I enjoy making my own decisions” and “I prefer a job where I have a lot of control over what I do and when I do it”).
• Aversion to External Dependency: A cognitive and emotional resistance against delegating vital tasks, coupled with irritation when others attempt to dictate behaviors or offer unsolicited direction (reflected in items such as “Others usually know what is best for me” [reverse-scored] and “I try to avoid situations where someone else tells me what to do”).
• Proactive Environmental Problem-Solving: An active behavioral response when confronting obstacles or disequilibrium, manifesting as immediate intervention rather than passive forbearance (e.g., “When I see a problem, I prefer to do something about it rather than sit by and let it continue”).
• Tolerance for Decisional Multiplicity: A willingness to confront complex choice menus and accept the attendant personal accountability, as opposed to preferring limited or pre-determined choice architectures (e.g., “There are many situations in which I would prefer only one choice rather than having to make a decision” [reverse-scored]).

Crucially, desire for control must be conceptually disentangled from psychopathological dominance or clinical narcissism. High-DC individuals are not necessarily driven by malevolent desires to oppress, exploit, or subjugate others; rather, their interpersonal assertiveness arises primarily as a defensive and functional mechanism to safeguard their own self-determination and prevent subjugation by their social surroundings.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework underpinning the Desire for Control Scale bridges multiple foundational paradigms within modern psychological science, prominently drawing upon Jack Brehm’s theory of psychological reactance, Julian Rotter’s social learning theory, Martin Seligman’s learned helplessness model, and Richard deCharms’ concepts of personal causation.

The earliest intellectual impetus for the DCS emerged from Brehm’s (1966) reactance theory, which posits that whenever an individual’s behavioral freedoms are threatened, eliminated, or constrained, a motivational state of psychological reactance is aroused, impelling the person to re-establish the threatened freedom. Burger and Cooper postulated that while reactance is a universal human potentiality, individuals display marked, stable dispositional differences in their sensitivity to freedom-threatening stimuli. Individuals who possess an elevated chronic desire for control experience acute reactance when faced with minimal or subtle constraints—such as unsolicited advice, mandatory bureaucratic requirements, or interpersonal pressure—leading to vigorous counter-attitudinal behaviors, oppositional defiance, and cognitive derogation of the restricting agent.

Concurrently, the DCS is heavily contextualized by the literature on perceived control and learned helplessness formulated by Seligman (1975) and expanded by Abramson, Seligman, and Teasdale (1978). In this framework, exposure to uncontrollable aversive stimuli can induce motivational, cognitive, and emotional deficits. Burger observed that the psychological impact of objectively uncontrollable events is moderated heavily by the victim’s pre-existing desire for control. When high-DC individuals are exposed to uncontrollable outcomes, their initial reaction is not passive surrender, but hyper-active striving and vigorous attempts to overcome the impasse. Only after repeated, undeniable demonstrations of futility do high-DC individuals experience profound helplessness, often descending into deeper states of frustration and depression than their low-DC counterparts, whose motivational systems are less fundamentally threatened by an absence of personal mastery.

Furthermore, the scale engages deeply with the locus of control paradigm. In Rotter’s social learning formulation, potential behavior is a joint function of the expectancy that an action will yield a reinforcement and the subjective value of that reinforcement. Rotter’s Internal-External (I-E) scale measured generalized expectancies. Burger and Cooper recognized that two individuals could share identical high internal locus of control expectancies (both believing that academic success is contingent upon personal diligence), yet value that control entirely differently: one may ardently pursue full responsibility for their educational journey, while another may find the prospect of absolute autonomy exhausting and anxiety-inducing. The DCS provides the requisite valuation component of this behavioral equation.

In contemporary motivational paradigms, the DCS intersects robustly with Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory (SDT). In SDT, autonomy is conceptualized as an innate, fundamental psychological need. The desire for control construct can be understood as an empirical operationalization of how this fundamental need manifests as a measurable personality trait across adult populations, highlighting the behavioral tensions that arise when individual autonomy strivings interact with varying social and institutional environments.

7. Validity

Extensive psychometric investigations conducted across four decades have established the construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related predictive validity of the Desire for Control Scale across normative adult, clinical, student, and organizational populations.

Convergent Validity: In their foundational 1979 validation studies across multiple collegiate and community cohorts, Burger and Cooper demonstrated substantial convergent validity with established personality constructs reflecting achievement, personal mastery, and assertion. The DCS exhibited a statistically significant positive correlation with the Type A coronary-prone behavior pattern (as measured by the Jenkins Activity Survey), demonstrating that the driving urgency, competitiveness, and impatience characteristic of Type A individuals are tightly bound to a chronic need to dominate one’s environment. Furthermore, the scale correlated positively with Rotter’s Internal Locus of Control, affirming that individuals who desire control generally cultivate the cognitive expectancy that outcomes are within human reach. Moderate, statistically significant correlations have also been documented with David McClelland’s need for power (n Power) and need for achievement (n Ach), as well as with measures of generalized assertiveness, self-efficacy, and hardiness.

Discriminant Validity: Demonstrating discriminant validity was paramount for Burger and Cooper to confirm that the DCS did not merely reflect generalized social desirability, vanity, or affective adjustment. Empirical correlations between the DCS and the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale have consistently yielded non-significant coefficients ranging from r = -0.05 to r = 0.08, confirming that high scores do not stem from a need for social approval or defensive image crafting. Furthermore, DCS scores correlate minimally with Snyder’s Self-Monitoring Scale, indicating that desire for control is distinct from the inclination to adjust one’s expressive behavior to match social cues. Weak correlations with global self-esteem (e.g., the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, r ≈ 0.12–0.18) illustrate that wanting control over one’s life is functionally distinct from subjective self-worth.

Predictive and Criterion Validity: The predictive validity of the DCS is exceptionally robust across laboratory experiments and naturalistic field research:

• Resistance to Social Influence and Persuasion: High-DC individuals consistently display elevated resistance to persuasive communications, sales pitches, and conformity pressures (such as in Asch-style conformity paradigms). They are markedly less susceptible to the “foot-in-the-door” compliance technique.
• Pre-decisional Information Search: In high-stakes decision tasks (including automotive purchases, financial investments, and medical choices), high-DC individuals conduct significantly more thorough and exhaustive information searches before executing a decision, actively minimizing their vulnerability to unforeseen contingencies.
• Attributional Style and Performance: Following engagement in complex motor or cognitive tasks, individuals scoring high on the DCS make significantly stronger internal attributions for both success and failure, actively claiming ownership of their outcomes. They also exhibit higher persistence on difficult or unsolvable puzzles before exhibiting behavioral fatigue.
• Consumer Behavior and Services: In consumer psychology, empirical trials demonstrate that high-DC shoppers react negatively to aggressive retail salespeople, demand extensive self-checkout and digital customizability, and respond far more favorably to autonomy-supportive service environments. Low-DC consumers, by comparison, report higher customer satisfaction when knowledgeable sales representatives or automated algorithmic recommender engines make definitive product selections for them.

8. Reliability

The Desire for Control Scale demonstrates excellent, stable psychometric reliability across diverse demographic strata, cultural translations, and longitudinal testing intervals.

Internal Consistency: In the initial psychometric validation across multiple independent cohorts comprising over 2,000 collegiate and general adult participants, Burger and Cooper (1979) reported Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging consistently between 0.76 and 0.80. Subsequent empirical investigations by independent research teams across diverse operational contexts have affirmed this reliability benchmark:

• Burger (1984, 1992) consistently replicated alpha coefficients across non-student adult and managerial samples within the 0.78 to 0.81 range.
• Cross-cultural adaptations, including German, Dutch (Gebhardt & Brosschot, 2002), and Chinese translations, have generated internal consistency estimates ranging from α = 0.74 to α = 0.82, underscoring the semantic coherence of the underlying construct across divergent linguistic and cultural frameworks.
• Mean corrected item-total correlations across the 20 items generally range between 0.28 and 0.54. Although items representing reverse-scored passivity (e.g., Item 7, Item 19) occasionally yield lower item-total correlations than agentic leadership items, removing them does not substantially elevate the overarching alpha, thereby warranting their inclusion for construct breadth.

Temporal Stability (Test-Retest Reliability): Longitudinal reliability assessments establish that the desire for control functions as an enduring personality trait rather than a transient, state-dependent affective fluctuation. In their initial investigations, Burger and Cooper administered the DCS to a cohort of 78 undergraduate respondents over a two-week interval, obtaining a Pearson test-retest correlation of r = 0.75 (p < 0.001). Subsequent long-term stability trials spanning six-week, three-month, and six-month intervals have documented stability coefficients ranging from r = 0.68 to r = 0.72. These statistics demonstrate sufficient longitudinal stability to warrant the instrument’s use in longitudinal observational studies, pre-post experimental designs, and clinical tracking.

9. Factor Analysis

The latent structural integrity of the Desire for Control Scale has been the subject of extensive exploratory factor analyses (EFA) and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) since its inception.

In the original 1979 investigation, Burger and Cooper subjected the 20 items to an exploratory principal components analysis with varimax rotation. Although the authors observed that the primary principal component accounted for the largest share of common variance (supporting their proposal to aggregate all 20 items into a single, parsimonious composite score), multiple distinct eigenvalues exceeding 1.0 were readily observed, indicating multidimensionality within the sub-components of control motivation.

Subsequent psychometric investigations have systematically scrutinized this latent structure. Most notably, Gebhardt and Brosschot (2002) conducted rigorous factor analyses across large adult community cohorts, identifying five distinct, replicable first-order factors that cleanly account for the behavioral heterogeneity of the 20 items:

1. General Desire for Control (Factor 1): Anchored heavily by items reflecting personal mastery over daily choices and life directions (e.g., Item 1: “I prefer a job where I have a lot of control…”, Item 8: “I enjoy making my own decisions”, Item 9: “I enjoy having control over my own destiny”). Factor loadings for these core items routinely fall between 0.52 and 0.71.
2. Leadership / Decisiveness (Factor 2): Comprising items measuring willingness to direct collective actions and issue instructions (e.g., Item 4: “I would prefer to be a leader rather than a follower”, Item 15: “When it comes to orders, I would rather give them than receive them”). Factor loadings span 0.60 to 0.78.
3. Avoidance of External Influence / Independence (Factor 3): Capturing an active revulsion toward being directed or managed by others (e.g., Item 3: “I try to avoid situations where someone else tells me what to do”, Item 18: “I prefer to avoid situations where someone else has to tell me what to do”). Factor loadings typically exceed 0.65.
4. Relinquishing Control / Passivity (Factor 4): Defined primarily by the reverse-scored items reflecting the psychological relief of delegating burdens (e.g., Item 10: “I would rather someone else take over the leadership role…”, Item 16: “I wish I could push many of life’s daily decisions off on someone else”, Item 20: “I like to wait and see if someone else is going to solve a problem…”). Item loadings range from 0.48 to 0.69.
5. Predictability and Preparedness (Factor 5): Reflecting desires to eliminate situational uncertainty through advance vigilance (e.g., Item 6: “I am careful to check everything on an automobile before I leave for a long trip”, Item 13: “I like to get into new situations where I cannot predict…” [which often loads negatively on traditional predictability]).

Confirmatory factor analytic (CFA) models testing a hierarchical, second-order structure—wherein these distinct first-order dimensions load onto a single higher-order “Desire for Control” latent factor—exhibit acceptable to good model fit indices across contemporary studies: Comparative Fit Index (CFI) ≈ 0.91–0.94, Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) ≈ 0.90–0.93, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) ≈ 0.048–0.058 (with 90% CI [0.041, 0.065]), and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) ≈ 0.052. Consequently, researchers possess psychometric justification for either evaluating specific subscale dynamics or computing a comprehensive 20-item composite score.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Name: Desire for Control Scale (DCS)
• Alternative Names: Desirability of Control Scale, Burger-Cooper Control Scale
• Authors / Developers: Jerry M. Burger, Ph.D., and Harris M. Cooper, Ph.D. (1979)
• Construct Measured: Individual dispositional motivation to exert mastery, command, autonomy, and decision-making authority over one’s life events, actions, and environmental conditions.
• Administration Format: Self-administered pencil-and-paper questionnaire or computerized online survey; suitable for individual or group testing.
• Administration Time: Approximately 5 to 8 minutes for complete self-administration.
• Target Population: Adults and adolescents aged 16 years and older; widely validated across university undergraduates, normative working adult populations, managers, corporate entrepreneurs, and clinical cohorts.
• Item Count: 20 items.
• Item Structure: 15 positively keyed statements reflecting active control preferences, and 5 negatively keyed (reverse-scored) statements reflecting preferences for delegating control or deferring decisions.
• Response Format: 7-point Likert scale (1 = This statement doesn’t apply to me at all to 7 = This statement always applies to me).
• Scoring Procedures:
  • Step 1: Reverse-score the 5 negatively keyed items: Item 7, Item 10, Item 16, Item 19, and Item 20. The transformation formula for a 7-point scale is: Reversed Score = 8 - Original Raw Score (e.g., a raw response of 1 becomes 7; 2 becomes 6; 7 becomes 1).
  • Step 2: Sum the raw scores of all 15 positively keyed items (Items 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18) and the transformed scores of the 5 reverse-scored items.
  • Step 3: Total composite scores range between a theoretical minimum of 20 and a theoretical maximum of 140. Higher total scores directly reflect a greater general desire for control.
• Normative Reference Values: In standard adult general community samples, the empirical mean total score is approximately M = 81.0, with a standard deviation of SD ≈ 10.0 (resulting in a typical mid-range distribution of 71 to 91). Scores exceeding 95 are conventionally categorized as high desire for control, whereas scores falling below 67 characterize low desire for control. Significantly higher mean scores (M ≈ 90–98) are routinely observed in managerial, executive, and entrepreneurial populations.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Desire for Control Scale was originally published in 1979 in the academic journal Motivation and Emotion (Burger & Cooper, 1979). In accordance with standard academic psychometric practices of that era, the 20 scale items were published directly within the seminal journal article for broad scientific, clinical, and pedagogical utilization. Researchers, clinicians, and graduate scholars may administer, adapt, and score the DCS for non-commercial educational, clinical, and scientific research purposes without royalty fees or formal written licensing agreements, provided that appropriate academic citation and attribution are given to Burger and Cooper (1979). Commercial enterprises, organizational consulting platforms, or entities seeking to integrate the scale into proprietary commercial assessment batteries or revenue-generating software tools should consult the journal copyright holder (Springer Nature) or contact Jerry M. Burger directly to secure appropriate commercial permissions.

12. References

Abramson, L. Y., Seligman, M. E., & Teasdale, J. D. (1978). Learned helplessness in humans: Critique and reformulation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 87(1), 49–74. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.87.1.49

Brehm, J. W. (1966). A theory of psychological reactance. Academic Press.

Burger, J. M. (1984). Desire for control, locus of control, and achievement concerns. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46(1), 177–183. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.46.1.177

Burger, J. M. (1985). Desire for control and depression: When trying harder makes things worse. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(5), 1404–1413. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.49.5.1404

Burger, J. M. (1987). Increased food intake as a reaction to social control. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 13(4), 517–526. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167287134008

Burger, J. M. (1992). Desire for control: Personality, social, and clinical perspectives. Springer Science & Business Media. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9981-1

Burger, J. M., & Cooper, H. M. (1979). The desirability of control. Motivation and Emotion, 3(4), 381–393. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00994052

Gebhardt, W. A., & Brosschot, J. F. (2002). Desirability of control: Psychometric properties and relationships with locus of control, personality, coping, and health. European Journal of Personality, 16(6), 423–438. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.463

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.

13. Items of the Scale