SELF-EFFICACY
narios that provide positive guides for performance. Those
Perceived self-efficacy is concerned with people’s beliefs
in their ability to influence events that affect their lives.
This core belief is the foundation of human motivation,
performance accomplishments, and emotional well-being
(Bandura, 1997, 2006). Unless people believe they can
produce desired effects by their actions, they have little
incentive to undertake activities or to persevere in the face
of difficulties. Whatever other factors may serve as guides
and motivators, they are rooted in the core belief that one
can make a difference by one’s actions.
People’s beliefs about their efficacy are developed from
four principal sources of information. The most effective
way of instilling a strong sense of efficacy is through
mastery experiences. Successes build a robust belief in
one’s personal efficacy. Failures undermine it, especially if
frequent failures occur in early phases in the development
of competencies. Development of resilient self-efficacy
requires experiences in overcoming obstacles through
perseverant effort. The second source of information is
social modeling. Models serve as sources of competencies
and motivation. Seeing people similar to oneself succeed
by perseverant effort raises observers’ beliefs in their
own capabilities. Social persuasion is the third type of
influence. Realistic boosts in efficacy can lead people to
exert greater effort, which increases their chances of
success. People also rely partly on their physiological
and mood states in judging their capabilities. They
read their tension, anxiety, and depression as signs of
personal vulnerability. In activities that require strength
and stamina, they read their fatigue and lack of energy
as indicators of low physical efficacy. This fourth way
of altering self-efficacy beliefs is to enhance physical
strength and stamina, reduce stress and depression, and
correct misinterpretations of somatic states.
Efficacy-Activated Processes
Self-efficacy beliefs regulate human functioning in four
major ways: cognitive, motivational, emotional, and selec-
tion processes.
Cognitive Processes
Much human behavior, being purposive, is regulated by
forethought embodying cognized goals. Personal goal set-
ting is influenced by self-appraisal of capabilities. The
stronger the perceived self-efficacy, the higher the goal
challenges people set for themselves and the firmer their
commitment to meeting them.
Most courses of behavior are initially shaped in thought.
People’s beliefs about their efficacy influences the types of
anticipatory scenarios they construct and rehearse. Those
The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology, edited by Irving B. Weiner and W. Edward Craighead.
Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
who have a high sense of efficacy visualize success sce-
who judge themselves as inefficacious are more inclined
to visualize failure scenarios that undermine performance
by dwelling on personal deficiencies and on how things
will go wrong. A major function of thought is to enable
people to predict the occurrence of events and to create the
means for exercising control over those that affect their
daily lives. It requires a high sense of efficacy to stick
with the laborious cognitive activity needed to extract pre-
dictive and operational knowledge from information that
contains many ambiguities, redundancies, and uncertain-
ties. The stronger the perceived self-efficacy, the more
effective people are in their analytic thinking and in
devising successful courses of action (Wood & Bandura,
1989).
Motivational Processes
Beliefs of personal efficacy play a central role in the
self-regulation of motivation. Most human motivation
is cognitively generated. In cognitive motivation, people
motivate themselves and guide their actions anticipato-
rily through the exercise of forethought. They form beliefs
about what they can do, they anticipate likely outcomes of
prospective actions, and they set goals for themselves and
plan courses of action designed to realize valued futures.
Different theories—attribution theory, expectancy-value
theory, and goal theory—have been built around these
various forms of cognitive motivators.
Perceived self-efficacy operates as a central factor in
each of these forms of cognitive motivation (Bandura,
1986, 1991). Efficacy beliefs bias the extent to which people
attribute their successes and failures to personal capabili-
ties or to external factors. People act on their beliefs about
what they can do, as well as on their beliefs about the
likely outcomes of various actions. The effects of outcome
expectancies on performance motivation are, therefore,
partly governed by self-beliefs of efficacy. There are many
activities that, if done well, guarantee valued outcomes,
but they are not pursued by people who doubt they can
do what it takes to succeed. Perceived self-efficacy also
contributes in several ways to motivation through goal
systems (Bandura, 1991; Locke & Latham, 1990). It is
partly on the basis of efficacy beliefs that people choose
what challenges to undertake, how much effort to expend
in the endeavor, and how long to persevere in the face of
obstacles and failures.
Human attainments and positive well-being require
an optimistic sense of personal efficacy (Bandura, 1986,
1997). This is because ordinary social realities are strewn
with difficulties. In a world full of impediments, failures,
adversities, setbacks, frustrations, and inequities, people
must have a robust sense of personal efficacy to sustain
the perseverant effort needed to succeed.
2 SELF-EFFICACY
Affective Processes
People’s beliefs in their coping capabilities also play a
pivotal role in the self-regulation of emotional states
(Bandura, 1997). There are three principal ways in which
self-efficacy beliefs affect the nature and intensity of
emotional experiences: Such beliefs create attentional
biases and influence how potentially aversive life events
are construed and cognitively represented. They affect
the exercise of control over perturbing thought patterns.
And they sponsor courses of action that transform dis-
tressing and threatening environments into more benign
ones (Williams, 1992). These alternative paths of influ-
encing emotional states are well documented in the
self-regulation of anxiety arousal and depressive mood.
People who believe they can exercise control over poten-
tial threats do not conjure up apprehensive thoughts
and hence are not distressed by them. But those who
believe they cannot manage potential threats experience
high levels of anxiety arousal. They dwell on their cop-
ing deficiencies, view many aspects of their environment
as fraught with danger, magnify the severity of pos-
sible threats, and worry about perils that rarely, if ever,
happen. Through such inefficacious thought, they distress
themselves and constrain and impair their functioning. It
is not the sheer frequency of perturbing cognitions, but
the perceived inefficacy to turn them off that is the major
source of distress (Kent & Gibbons, 1987).
In addition, people with a high sense of efficacy to man-
age unpleasant emotional states by palliative means can
get themselves to relax, direct their attention to favorable
things, calm themselves, and seek support from friends,
family, and others. For those who believe they can get
relief in these ways, anxiety and sadness are easier to
tolerate.
A low sense of efficacy to gain and maintain what one
values highly contributes to depression in at least three
ways. One route is through unfulfilled aspiration. People
who impose on themselves standards of self-worth that
they judge they cannot attain drive themselves to bouts of
depression. A second efficacy route to depression is through
a low sense of social efficacy to develop social relationships
that bring satisfaction to one’s life and cushion the adverse
effects of chronic stressors. A low sense of social efficacy
contributes to depression both directly and by curtailing
development of socially supportive relationships (Hola-
han & Holahan, 1987). The third route to depression is
through thought control efficacy. People live in a psychic
environment largely of their own making. Much human
depression is cognitively generated by dejecting rumina-
tive thought. A low sense of efficacy to exercise control over
ruminative thought contributes to the occurrence, dura-
tion, and recurrence of depressive episodes (Kavanagh &
Wilson, 1989).
Selection Processes
The final way in which self-beliefs of efficacy contribute
to human adaptation and change concerns selection pro-
cesses (Bandura, 1995). Beliefs of personal efficacy shape
the course of lives by influencing selection of activities
and environments. People tend to avoid activities and
situations they believe exceed their coping capabilities,
but they readily undertake challenging activities and
pick social environments they judge themselves capable
of handling. Any factor that influences choice behavior
can profoundly affect the direction of personal develop-
ment. This is because the social influences operating in
selected environments continue to promote certain com-
petencies, values, and interests long after the decisional
determinant has rendered its inaugurating effect. Career
choice and development is but one example of the power of
self-efficacy beliefs to affect the course of life paths through
choice-related processes (Hackett, 1995; Lent, Brown, &
Hackett, 1994; Pajares & Urdan, 2006).
People with a low sense of efficacy in a given domain
of functioning shy away from difficult tasks, which they
tend to perceive as personal threats; have low aspira-
tions and weak commitment to the goals they choose; turn
inward on their self-doubts instead of thinking about how
to perform successfully; when faced with difficulties, dwell
on obstacles, the consequences of failure, and their per-
sonal deficiencies; attribute failures to deficient capability;
slacken their efforts or give up quickly in the face of difficul-
ties; are slow to recover their sense of efficacy after failures
or setbacks; and are prone to stress and depression. People
who have a strong sense of efficacy, by contrast, approach
difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as
threats to be avoided; set challenging goals and sustain
strong commitment to their goals; concentrate on how to
perform successfully rather than on disruptive personal
concerns in the face of problems; attribute failures to
insufficient effort or deficient knowledge and skills that
are remediable; redouble their effort in the face of obsta-
cles; quickly recover their sense of efficacy after failures
or setbacks; and display low vulnerability to stress and
depression.
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ALBERT BANDURA
Stanford University
See also: Self-Control; Self-Protection; Social Learning
Theory