SELF-EFFICACY BELIEFS IN HUMAN

FUNCTIONING
by Albert Bandura
from Social Foundations of Thought and Action, 1986
SELF-EFFICACY BELIEFS AFFECT HUMAN AGENCY IN
DIVERSE WAYS:

1. Choice behavior
o People tend to avoid engaging in a task where their efficacy is low, and
generally undertake tasks where their efficacy is high. (p. 393)
o Accurate self-efficacy appraisal are important. The consequences are
aversive for high-efficacy/low skill (irreparable harm) and restrictive (no
growth) for low-efficacy/high skill.
o The efficacy judgments that are the most functional are probably those that
slightly exceed what one can do at any given time. (p. 394)
2. Effort expenditure and persistence
o The stronger the perceived self-efficacy, the more vigorous and persistent
are people's their efforts.
o There is a distinction between the effects of strength of perceived self-
efficacy on effort during learning and during execution of established skills.
o Self doubt creates the impetus for learning but hinders adept use of
previously established skills. In other words, high self-efficacy can be a
double-edged sword, because individuals with high self-efficacy "may feel
little need to invest much preparatory effort" (p. 394).
o It is when one is applying skills that high-efficacy "intensifies and sustains
the effort needed to realize a difficult performance, which are hard to attain if
one is doubt-ridden" (p. 394).
3. Thought patterns and emotional reactions
o Individuals with low self-efficacy tend to believe that things are tougher than
they really are. This creates stress and narrow vision of how best to go about
the problem. "By contrast, persons who have a strong sense of efficacy
deploy their attention and effort to the demands of the situation and are
spurred by obstacles to greater effort" (p. 394).
o Perceived self-efficacy also shapes causal thinking. High efficacy people
attribute failure to insufficient effort (this supports a success orientation);
low efficacy attribute failure to deficient ability (see Collins, 1982).
4. Humans as producers rather than simply foretellers of behavior
o "Research shows that people who regard themselves as highly efficacious
act, think, and feel differently from those who perceive themselves as
inefficacious. They produce their own future, rather than simply foretell it"
(p. 395).

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SELF-EFFICACY JUDGMENT

AND ACTION
Self-efficacy judgments are related to action, but a number of factors can affect the strength
of the relationship.

"Perceived self-efficacy contributes to the development of subskills, as well as draws upon

them in fashioning new behavior patterns" (p. 395).

People with high efficacy build more skills through their continued effort; people with low
efficacy inhibit and retard the development of needed subskills.
 1. Disincentives and performance constraints
o People with high efficacy and high skills may lack the incentive to behave in a
predisposed manner. They may also lack necessary equipment or resources
to perform. There are also social constraints.
o "When performances are impeded by disincentives, inadequate resources, or
external constraints, self-judged efficacy will exceed the actual performance"
(p. 396). That is, individuals may express that they are capable, but they will
fail to perform because they feel impeded by these constraints.
2. Consequences of misjudgment
o "When people have to choose between courses of action that have significant
personal consequences, or have to decide how long they will continue a
thwarting activity that consumes their time, effort, and resources, then
accurate self-appraisals serve as valuable guides for action" (p. 396).
3. Temporal disparities
o "The relationship between self-referent thought and action is most accurately
revealed when they are measured in close temporal proximity" (p. 396).
Therefore, self-efficacy must be checked periodically to assess the effect of
their experiences on their competencies.
4. Faulty assessments of self-percepts or performance
o "Causal processes are best clarified by a microanalytic approach in which
self-reference thought is measured in terms of particularized self-percepts of
efficacy that may vary across activities and circumstances, rather than in
terms of a global disposition assayed by an omnibus test" (p. 396).
o "Measures of self-percept s must be tailored to the domain of psychological
functioning being explored" (p. 396). That is, researchers must make certain
that they are measuring the self-efficacy relevant to the experience being
engaged in.
o Level, generality, and strength.
o Disparities will occur if efficacy is measured for a simulated situation and
performance is subsequently measured in a real situation, or vice versa.
5. Misweighting requisite subskills
o "When performance requirements are ill-defined, underestimating task
demands produces errors in the direction of overassurance; overestimating
task demands will produce errors in the conservative direction" (p. 397).
6. Obscure aims and performance ambiguity
o "When aims are clear and level of performance is discernible, self-percepts of
efficacy operate as influential regulators of performance attainment" (p.
398).
o This bears careful consideration in light of the role of mentors.
o "The problem of performance ambiguity arises when aspects of one's
performances are not personally observable or when the level of
accomplishment is socially judged by ill-defined criteria so that one has to
rely on others to find how one is doing" (p. 398).
o "In most of the situations discussed thus far, self-appraisals of efficacy are
reasonably accurate, but they diverge from action because people do not
know fully whet they will have to do, lack information for regulating their
effort, or are hindered by external factors from doing what they can" (p.
398).
7. Faulty self-knowledge
o "In new undertaking people have insufficient experience to assess the
veridicality of their self-appraisals and hence must infer their performance
capabilities from knowledge of what they can do in other situations, which
may be misleading" (p. 398).
o Personal factors can distort efficacy perceptions.
o "Distortions in memory of efficacy-relevant experiences and the
circumstances under which they occurred will produce faulty self-appraisals"
(p. 398).

SOURCES OF SELF-EFFICACY INFORMATION

1. Mastery experience (enactive attainment)
 o The most influential source of efficacy information because it is based on
authentic mastery experience. Successes raise efficacy appraisals; failures
lower them. (399)
o But the contextual filter is at work here--after "a strong sense of self-efficacy
is developed through repeated successes, occasional failures are unlikely to
have much effect on judgments of one's capabilities" (p. 399).
o "People who are assured of their capabilities are more likely to look to
situational factors, insufficient effort, or poor strategies as the causes" (p.
399).
o "Failures that are overcome by determined effort can instill robust percepts
of self-efficacy through experience that one can eventually master even the
most difficult obstacles" (p. 399). Imagine the implications.
o Once established, enhanced self-efficacy tends to generalize to other
situations . . . in activities that are similar to those in which self-efficacy was
enhanced.
2. Vicarious experience
o If others can do it . . . but by the same token, "observing that others
perceived to be similarly competent fail despite high effort lowers observers'
judgments of their own capabilities and undermines their efforts" (p. 399).
o Some factors make us more sensitive to vicarious influence
1. Uncertainty about our own capability.
2. Little prior experience.
3. Criteria by which ability is evaluated - "Because most performances
are evaluated in terms of social criteria, social comparative
information figures prominently in self-efficacy appraisals" (p. 400).
o "Although vicarious experiences are generally weaker than direct ones,
vicarious forms can produce significant, enduring changes through their
effects on performance. People convinced vicariously of their inefficacy are
inclined to behave in ineffectual ways that, in fact, generate confirmatory
behavioral evidence of inability. Conversely, modeling influences that
enhance perceived self-efficacy can weaken the impact of direct experiences
of failure by sustaining performances in the face of repeated failure. A given
mode of influence can thus set in motion processes that augment its effects
or diminish the effects of otherwise powerful influences" (p. 400).
3. Social persuasion (including verbal persuasions)
o "Can contribute to successful performance if the heightened appraisal is
within realistic bounds" (p. 400).
o "However, the raising of unrealistic beliefs of personal competence only
invites failures that will discredit the persuaders and will further undermine
the recipient's perceived self-efficacy" (p. 400).
o "It is probably more difficult to produce enduring increases in perceived
efficacy by persuasory means than to undermine it" (p. 400).
4. Physiological states
o People "read their somatic arousal in stressful or taxing situations as
ominous signs of vulnerability to dysfunction" (p. 401).
o Fear reactions. Fatigue. Aches and pains. General mal estar.
o "Treatments that eliminate emotional arousal to subjective threats heighten
perceived self-efficacy with corresponding improvements in performance" (p.
401).

Cognitive processing of self-efficacy information

• "Information that is relevant for judging personal capabilities . . . becomes

instructive only through cognitive appraisal" (p. 401). In other words, much depends
on how an individual interprets all of the above.
• "When experience contradicts firmly held judgments of self-efficacy, people may not
change their beliefs about themselves if the conditions of performance are such as to
lead them to discount the import of their experience" (p. 401). The Perseverance
Phenomena - see Nisbett and Ross, 1980.
• The cognitive processing of efficacy information involves two separable functions:
 1. Type of information people attend to and use as indicators of personal
efficacy.
2. Combination rules or heuristics they employ for weighting and integrating
efficacy information from different sources in forming their self-efficacy
judgments.

INTEGRATION OF SELF-EFFICACY INFORMATION

"In forming their efficacy judgments, people have to deal not only with different
configurations of efficacy-relevant information conveyed by a given modality, but they also
have to weigh and integrate efficacy information from these diverse sources. The weights
assigned to different types of efficacy information may vary across different domains of
activity" (p. 409). Connectedness - see the work of Milton Rokeach.

"There has been little research on how people process multidimensional efficacy information"
(p. 409) or how people process multidimensional beliefs.

GENERALITY OF SELF-EFFICACY BELIEFS

Microanalytic research strategy

• "Individuals are presented with self-efficacy scales representing tasks varying in

difficulty, complexity, stressfulness, or in some other dimension, depending on the
particular domain of functioning being explored. They designate the tasks they judge
they can do and their degree of certainty that they can execute them" (p. 422).
• We must safeguard against "whether self-efficacy probes can affect performance by
creating public commitment and pressure for consistency" (p. 422).
• "Veridical self-appraisal is best achieved under conditions that reduce concern over
social evaluation. When social evaluation of people's efficacy judgements is made
salient, they are inclined to become conservative in their self-appraisals" (p. 422).

OF CENTRAL INTEREST TO SELF-EFFICACY THEORY

IS THE DYNAMIC INTERPLAY BETWEEN
SELF-REFERENT THOUGHT, ACTION, AND AFFECT
• "It is not uncommon for perceived self-efficacy to predict future behavior better than
past performance" (p. 424). In part because past behavior affects future actions
partly through its effects on perceived self-perceptions.
• If you can control how well people judge that they can perform, you account for
much of the variance in the kinds of outcomes they expect. (p. 393)
• Perceived self-efficacy predicts performance better than expected outcomes (p. 393).
But this is not true if
1. Outcome expectations can be dissociated from self-efficacy judgments when
either no action can produce a selected effect or extrinsic outcomes are
loosely linked to level or quality of performance. Such structural
arrangements permit social biases to come into play, so that the same
performance attainments may produce variable and often inequitable
outcomes. In prejudicially structured systems, variations in performance,
however skillfully executed, may be little or no effect on some desired
outcomes. Thus, for example, when athletes were rigidly segregated by race,
black athletes could not gain entry to major league baseball no matter how
well they pitched or batted. (p. 393)
2. Expected outcomes are also partially separable from self-efficacy judgments
when extrinsic outcomes are fixed to a minimum level of performance, as
when a designated level of productivity produces a fixed pay but better
performance brings no additional monetary benefits. When effects are
socially linked to some minimal standard, performance exerts only partial
control over outcomes.
Incorporate the above into a theoretical perspective and rationale that permits focusing on
the following questions:

1. What are the effects of knowledge and skills brought to the tutoring situation? What
are the effects of self-efficacy beliefs (personal self-efficacy and teaching efficacy) of
the tutors? What are the effects of the outcome expectations of the tutors?
2. How does the interplay among knowledge and skills, perceived efficacy, and outcome
expectations affect the behavior and perceptions of the tutors?
3. How do efficacy beliefs and outcome expectations change as a function of experience
with the program? Why?