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.

Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.

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.

Moral justification is a powerful disengagement mechanism. Destructive conduct is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it in the service of moral ends. This is why most appeals against violent means usually fall on deaf ears.

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.

People who believe they have the power to exercise some measure of control over their lives are healthier, more effective and more successful than those who lack faith in their ability to effect changes in their lives.

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.

People's conceptions about themselves and the nature of things are developed and verified through four different processes: direct experience of the effects produced by their actions, vicarious experience of the effects produced by somebody else's actions, judgments voiced by others, and derivation of further knowledge from what they already know by using rules of inference

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.

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

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.

Dysfunctions can occur in each of the self-regulatory subfunctions-in how personal experiences are self-monitored and cognitively processed, in the evaluative self-standards that are adopted, and in the evaluative self-reactions to one's own behavior.. Problems at any one of these points can create self-dissatisfactions and dejection. dysfunctions in all aspects of the self system are most apt to produce the most chronic self-disparagement and despondency

If you look at our theories of social pathology and then at the dismal conditions in which children grow up in our ghettos, you would predict that all of them would be on drugs or psychological basket cases. Yet if you use criteria like gainful employment, forming partnerships and life without crime, you will find that most of those kids make it.

Perceived self-efficacy also shapes causal thinking. In seeking solutions to difficult problems, those who perceived themselves as highly efficacious are inclined to attribute their failures to insufficient effort, whereas those of comparable skills but lower perceived self-efficacy ascribe their failures to deficient ability

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Success and failure are largely self-defined in terms of personal standards. The higher the self-standards, the more likely will given attainments be viewed as failures, regardless of what others might think.

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

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

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

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

One cannot afford to be a realist.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

This has increased with the tremendous technological advances in communications. We have a vast new world of images brought into our sitting rooms electronically. Most of the images of reality on which we base our actions are really based on vicarious experience. This has increased with the tremendous technological advances in communications. We have a vast new world of images brought into our sitting-rooms electronically.