People behave agentically, but they produce theories that afford people very little agency.
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.
Where everyone is responsible, no one is really responsible.
It requires a strong sense of responsibility to be a good functionary. In situations involving obedience to authority, people carry out orders partly to honor the obligations they have undertaken. One must, therefore, distinguish between two levels of responsibility – duty to one’s superiors, and accountability for the effects of one’s actions.
What is immoral to do is immoral to threaten.
It requires conducive social conditions, rather than monstrous people, to produce heinous deeds.
The human mind is generative, creative, proactive, and reflective – not just reactive.
Analyses of moral disengagement mechanisms usually draw heavily on examples from military and political violence. This tends to convey the impression that selective disengagement of self-sanctions occurs only under extraordinary circumstances. The truth is quite the contrary. Such mechanisms operate in everyday situations in which decent people routinely perform activities having injurious human effects, to further their own interests or for profit.