Psychological hardiness: Kobasa's three Cs and how they differ from resilience

In the 1970s the psychologist Suzanne Kobasa studied business executives who had all been through a lot of stress in the previous few years. Some of them had been ill often, others hardly at all. In her 1979 paper she reported that the healthier group differed in three attitudes, which she called commitment, control and challenge. She named the combination hardiness.

The study compared people at one point in time, so it could not show that the attitudes came first and the good health followed. Later studies by Kobasa and her colleagues followed people over time and pointed the same way, and the three Cs have been part of stress research since.

The three Cs

Commitment is the sense that what you do is worth doing. A committed person gets involved in their work, their relationships and what happens around them, instead of watching their own life from the stands. Under pressure, they have a reason to stay engaged.

Control is the belief that your actions make a difference, even when you cannot steer everything. When something goes wrong, a person high on control first asks "what can I do about this?" instead of "why does this always happen to me?".

Challenge is seeing change as a normal part of life and a chance to learn, not as a threat to your safety. People high on challenge are curious about what a big change might bring. People low on it feel safest when nothing new happens.

How the test asks about them

Our Psychological Hardiness Test has 18 statements, six for each C. We wrote them ourselves, based on Kobasa's description of the three attitudes, so the test is not her questionnaire and has not been validated. A few examples of what it asks: whether you know what you are doing all this for (commitment), whether you can find at least one thing you can influence in a hard situation (control), whether you would rather try something new and fail than never try (challenge).

You get a score for each C. The pattern across the three often says more than any one number. High control with low commitment, for example, can describe someone who copes efficiently but has stopped caring why.

Hardiness and resilience are different questions

The two words get used as if they meant the same thing. Hardiness is about the attitudes you bring into a hard period. Resilience, as most current scales measure it, is about how quickly you recover afterwards.

If you want the recovery side, take our resilience test. Its resilience part is based on the Brief Resilience Scale (Smith et al., 2008), a published, validated measure of bouncing back. Doing both tests gives you the before and the after. For practical ways to build resilience, read psychological resilience: how to build it.

Can hardiness change?

Kobasa treated hardiness as a set of attitudes, and attitudes can shift. Her colleague Salvatore Maddi later built a training programme around the three Cs. A simple start is the control question: the next time something goes wrong, write down one thing you can do about it, even a small one.

If stress is already affecting your sleep, health or mood, a self-reflection test is not enough on its own. The perceived stress test (PSS-10) gives a fuller picture, and a doctor or psychologist can help you look at it.