It is no more informative to speak of self-efficacy in global terms than to speak of nonspecific social behavior.
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.
Perceived self-efficacy influences the types of causal attributions people make for their performances.
People infer high self-efficacy from successes achieved through minimal effort on difficult tasks, but they infer low self-efficacy if they had to work hard under favorable conditions to master relatively easy tasks.
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.
Gaining insight into one’s underlying motives, it seems, is more like a belief conversion than a self-discovery process.
To grant thought causal efficacy is not to invoke a disembodied mental state.
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.
Perceived self-efficacy and beliefs about the locus of outcome causality must be distinguished.
The performances of others are often selected as standards for self-improvement of abilities.
People judge their capabilities partly by comparing their performances with those of others.
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.
Perceived self-inefficacy predicts avoidance of academic activities whereas anxiety does not.
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.
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.
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.