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From newspaper accounts it appears that when women were attacked and bystanders did not intervene, frequently the bystanders justified their inactivity by stating that they thought it was a "lovers' quarrel." In the first study subjects witnessed a violent fight between a man and a woman. Subjects intervened more frequently in the fight between strangers than between a married couple. In additional experiments it was found that the stranger condition was perceived as being more damaging to the woman although the fights themselves were identical. The woman in the stranger condition was seen as wanting help more frequently than the married woman. In addition the attacker was perceived as likely to run in the stranger condition and to stay and fight in the married condition. If subjects know little about the conflict, they are likely to perceive the protagonists as dates, lovers, or married couples rather than as strangers, acquaintances, or friends. The results were discussed in terms of their implication for social control.

Although this concept has rarely been investigated systematically, the prison is an environment that severely limits inmates’personal control. This article applies theoretical and empirical advances in the area of personal control to the issue of inmate adjustment to prison. Personal control has three components: outcome control, choice, and predictability of future events. Research findings suggesting adverse impacts of limited control are discussed in light of their implications for prisoner adjustment. Several models of personal control, including the environmental/learned helplessness, individual difference/self‐efficacy, and incongruency/reactance models, are applied to the process of prisoner adjustment. Using these models, a conceptual framework for integrating past research in the sociology and social psychology of corrections is proposed, and directions for future research are discussed.

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