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
Dualistic doctrines that regard mind and body as separate entities do not provide much enlightenment on the nature of the disembodied mental state or on how an immaterial mind and bodily events act on each other

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

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
Forceful actions arising from erroneous beliefs often create social effects that confirm the misbeliefs

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
People regulate their level and distribution of effort in accordance with the effects they expect their actions to have. As a result, their behavior is better predicted from their beliefs than from the actual consequences of their actions

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
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
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
People who are burdened by acute misgivings about their coping capabilities suffer much distress and expend much effort in defensive action... they cannot get themselves to do things they find subjectively threatening even though they are objectively safe. They may even shun easily manageable activities because they see them as leading to more threatening events over which they will be unable to exercise adequate control

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

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

Albert Bandura
Self-appraisals of efficacy are reasonably accurate, but they diverge from action because people do not know fully what they will have to do, lack information for regulating their effort, or are hindered by external factors from doing what they can

Albert Bandura
Students judge how well they might do in a chemistry course from knowing how peers, who performed comparably to them in physics, fared in chemistry

Albert Bandura
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.

Albert Bandura
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.

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

Albert Bandura