Albert Bandura Quotes

In order to succeed, people need a sense of self-efficacy, to struggle together with resilience to meet the inevitable obstacles and inequities of life.

People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities.

What people think, believe, and feel affects how they behave. The natural and extrinsic effects of their actions, in turn, partly determine their thought patterns and affective reactions.

Self-belief does not necessarily ensure success, but self-disbelief assuredly spawns failure.

People with high assurance in their capabilities approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided.

People not only gain understanding through reflection, they evaluate and alter their own thinking.

Most of the images of reality on which we base our actions are really based on vicarious experience.

Humans are producers of their life circumstance not just products of them.

Psychology cannot tell people how they ought to live their lives. It can however, provide them with the means for effecting personal and social change.

There are countless studies on the negative spillover of job pressures on family life, but few on how job satisfaction enhances the quality of family life.

The content of most textbooks is perishable, but the tools of self-directedness serve one well over time.

Self-doubt creates the impetus for learning but hinders adept use of previously established skills

Once established, reputations do not easily change.

When people are not aiming for anything in particular or when they cannot monitor their performance, there is little basis for translating perceived efficacy into appropriate magnitudes of effort

Ironically, it is the talented who have high aspirations, which are possible but exceedingly difficult to realize, who are especially vulnerable to self-dissatisfaction despite notable achievements.

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.

In social cognitive theory, perceived self-efficacy results from diverse sources of information conveyed vicariously and through social evaluation, as well as through direct experience

Freedom [should not be] conceived negatively as exemption from social influences or situational constraints. Rather...positively as the exercise of self-influence to bring about desired results.

People judge their capabilities partly by comparing their performances with those of others

Self-efficacy beliefs differ from outcome expectations, judgments of the likely consequence [that] behavior will produce.

The satisfactions people derive from what they do are determined to a large degree by their self-evaluative standards

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.

Even the self-assured will raise their perceived self-efficacy if models teach them better ways of doing things.

If self-efficacy is lacking, people tend to behave ineffectually, even though they know what to do.

We are more heavily invested in the theories of failure than we are in the theories of success.

A theory that denies that thoughts can regulate actions does not lend itself readily to the explanation of complex human behavior.

Self-efficacy is the belief in one's capabilities to organize and execute the sources of action required to manage prospective situations.

People behave agentically, but they produce theories that afford people very little agency.

Through their capacity to manipulate symbols and to engage in reflective thought, people can generate novel ideas and innovative actions that transcend their past experiences

The performances of others are often selected as standards for self-improvement of abilities

One cannot afford to be a realist.

The adequacy of performance attainments depends upon the personal standards against which they are judged

Accomplishment is socially judged by ill defined criteria so that one has to rely on others to find out how one is doing.

How children learn to use diverse sources of efficacy information in developing a stable and accurate sense of personal efficacy is a matter of considerable interest

Coping with the demands of everyday life would be exceedingly trying if one could arrive at solutions to problems only by actually performing possible options and suffering the consequences.

Gaining insight into one's underlying motives, it seems, is more like a belief conversion than a self-discovery process

The effects of outcome expectancies on performance motivation are partly governed by self-beliefs of efficacy

Even noteworthy performance attainments do not necessarily boost perceived self-efficacy

Self-appraisals are influenced by evaluative reactions of others.

Stringent standards of self-evaluation [can] make otherwise objective successes seem to be personal failures

The evaluative habits developed in sibling interactions undoubtedly affect the salience and choice of comparative referents in self-ability evaluations in later life

Judgments of adequacy involve social comparison processes

People who hold a low view of themselves [will credit] their achievements to external factors, rather than to their own capabilities.

Incongruities between self-efficacy and action may stem from misperceptions of task demands, as well as from faulty self-knowledge

A problem of future research is to clarify how young children learn what type of social comparative information is most useful for efficacy evaluation

Misbeliefs in one's inefficacy may retard development of the very subskills upon which more complex performances depend

[Children] receive direct instruction from time to time about the appropriateness of various social comparisons

[Attributional] factors serve as conveyors of efficacy information that influence performance largely through their intervening effects on self-percepts of efficacy

Perceived self-efficacy influences the types of causal attributions people make for their performances

Perceived self-inefficacy predicts avoidance of academic activities whereas anxiety does not