> Even if your boss is a jerk, you still have control of your own life.
That's the whole point - people with a strong external locus will think they do not have control of their own life, and whatever they do or happens to them is 'karma' or 'destiny' and they can't change it, no matter what they do. They expect the next job they'll have will be again for another jerk boss (and because they act with that attitude it may very well become a self fulfilling prophecy).
And all of this is also influenced by a lot of factors, like religion, language, ..
Most people don't think about it and take what we know/how we think now for granted, without realizing a lot of factors are involved.
I recently read a book about the history of statistics, and how religion/language/writing was also a factor.
Romans and Greeks were very intelligent people, used a lot of advanced math and calculations, and (iirc) never got the notion of chance.
One of the reasons was that their way of writing numbers (fractions) wasn't optimal for it (having 1 in 10 or 2/13 chance of an event is easier to read/calculate with than I/V or II/XIII).
Religion was also important - they just believed everything happened for a reason, because one of their gods decided it, .. They had dice and games with dice, but never tried to calculate how it worked - because they did not think that chance/luck existed. So there was no reason to start making formulas for something they believed did not exist..
So yes I believe the original study will have some merit - although we now live in a global world where everything is connected (and we speak/know of many languages), culture of certain countries is still passed trough many generations.
If your language does not allow you to talk well about present/future, it will in some way shape how you think and how you act.