Albert Bandura - Social Foundations of Thought and Action (1986)

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

Albert Bandura
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.

Albert Bandura
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.

Albert Bandura
To grant thought causal efficacy is not to invoke a disembodied mental state

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

Albert Bandura
Given a sufficient level of perceived self-efficacy to take on threatening tasks, phobics perform them with varying amounts of fear arousal depending on the strength of their perceived self-efficacy

Albert Bandura
In the self-appraisal of efficacy, there are many sources of information that must be processed and weighed through self-referent thought

Albert Bandura
As a general rule, moderate levels of arousal facilitate deployment of skills, whereas high arousal disrupts it. This is especially true of complex activities requiring intricate organization of behavior

Albert Bandura
Such knowledge is probably gained in several ways. One process undoubtedly operates through social comparison of success and failure experiences. Children repeatedly observe their own behavior and the attainments of others

Albert Bandura
People are much more likely to act on their self-percepts of efficacy inferred from many sources of information rather than rely primarily on visceral cues. This is not surprising because self knowledge based on information about one's coping skills, past accomplishments, and social comparison is considerably more indicative of capability than the indefinite stirrings of the viscera

Albert Bandura
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

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

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

Albert Bandura
The human condition is better improved by altering detrimental circumstances and personal perspectives than by trying to alter personal outlooks, while ignoring the very circumstances that serve to nourish them

Albert Bandura
Self-appraisals are influenced by evaluative reactions of others

Albert Bandura
Among the types of thoughts that affect action, none is more central or pervasive than people's judgments of their capabilities to deal effectively with different realities

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

Albert Bandura
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.

Albert Bandura
When actions are followed by events that are not causally related to the prior acts, people often erroneously perceive contingencies that do not, in fact, exist

Albert Bandura
Moreover, joint occurrences tend to be better recalled than instances when the effect does not occur. The proneness to remember confirming instances, but to overlook disconfirming ones, further serves to convert, in thought, coincidences into causalities.

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

Albert Bandura
Accurate processing of information about outcomes is no simple task under the variable conditions of everyday life... usually, many factors enter into determining what effects, if any, given actions will have, Actions, therefore, produce outcomes probabilistically rather than certainly. Depending on the particular conjunction of factors, the same course of action may produce given outcomes regularly, occasionally, or only infrequently

Albert Bandura
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

Albert Bandura
To the extent that children with similar characteristics achieve comparable performance levels, using the performances of similar peers is likely to yield more accurate self-appraisal than using the accomplishments of dissimilar peers

Albert Bandura
Comparative appraisals of efficacy require not only evaluation of one;s own performances but also knowledge of how others do, cognizance of nonability determinants of their performances, and some understanding that it is others, like oneself, who provide the most informative social criterion for comparison

Albert Bandura