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.
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.
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 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.
In the self-appraisal of efficacy, there are many sources of information that must be processed and weighed through self-referent thought.
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.
Forceful actions arising from erroneous beliefs often create social effects that confirm the misbeliefs.
Discrepancies between self-efficacy judgment and performance will arise when either the tasks or the circumstances under which they are performed are ambiguous.
When experience contradicts firmly held judgments of self-efficacy, people may not change their beliefs about themselves if the conditions of performance are such as to lead them to discount the import of the experience.
Incongruities between self-efficacy and action may stem from misperceptions of task demands, as well as from faulty self-knowledge.
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.
Agemates provide the most informative points of reference for comparative efficacy appraisal and verification. Children are, therefore, especially sensitive to their relative standing among the peers with whom they affiliate in activities that determine prestige and popularity.
People behave agentically, but they produce theories that afford people very little agency.
Indeed there are many competent people who are plagued by a sense of inefficacy, and many less competent ones who remain unperturbed by impending threats because they are self-assured of their coping capabilities.
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.
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.
A problem of future research is to clarify how young children learn what type of social comparative information is most useful for efficacy evaluation.
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.
Even noteworthy performance attainments do not necessarily boost perceived self-efficacy.
Self efficacious children tend to attribute their successes to ability, but ability attributions affect performance indirectly through perceived self-efficacy.