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Humans are producers of their life circumstance not just products of them.
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Self-efficacy is the belief in one's capabilities to organize and execute the sources of action required to manage prospective situations.
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People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities.
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Most of the images of reality on which we base our actions are really based on vicarious experience.
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Self efficacious children tend to attribute their successes to ability, but ability attributions affect performance indirectly through perceived self-efficacy.
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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.
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Judgments of adequacy involve social comparison processes.
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Many people who gain recognition and fame shape their lives by overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles, only to be catapulted into new social realities over which they have less control and manage badly. Indeed, the annals of the famous and infamous are strewn with individuals who were both architects and victims of their life courses.
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Perceived self-efficacy in coping with potential threats leads people to approach such situations anxiously, and experience of disruptive arousal may further lower their sense of efficacy that they will be able to perform skillfully.
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Self-belief does not necessarily ensure success, but self-disbelief assuredly spawns failure.
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In any given instance, behavior can be predicted best by considering both self-efficacy and outcome beliefs . . . different patterns of self-efficacy and outcome beliefs are likely to produce different psychological effects.
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To grant thought causal efficacy is not to invoke a disembodied mental state.
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People's judgments of their capabilities to organize and execute courses of action required to attain designated types of performances.
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Self-appraisals are influenced by evaluative reactions of others.
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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.
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By sticking it out through tough times, people emerge from adversity with a stronger sense of efficacy.
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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.
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Stringent standards of self-evaluation [can] make otherwise objective successes seem to be personal failures.
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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.
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Social cognitive theory rejects the dichotomous conception of self as agent and self as object. Acting on the environment and acting on oneself entail shifting the perspective of the same agent rather than reifying different selves regulating each other or transforming the self from agent to object.
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The presence of many interacting influences, including the attainments of others, create further leeway in how one's performances and outcomes are cognitively appraised.
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The difficulty in judging what type of behavior works well arises not only because a given course of action does not always produce the outcomes. Similar outcomes can occur for reasons other than the person's actions, which further complicates inferential judgment. Effects that arise independently of one's actions distort the influence of similar effects produced by the actions, but only on some occasions. Given a strong cognitive set to perceive regularities, even chance joint occurrences of events can be easily misjudged as genuine relationships of low contingent probability.
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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.
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Behavior, cognitive, and other personal factors, and environmental influences all operate interactively as determinants of each other.