Albert Bandura
Albert Bandura
Albert Bandura OCis a psychologist who is the David Starr Jordan Professor Emeritus of Social Science in Psychology at Stanford University. For almost six decades, he has been responsible for contributions to the field of education and to many fields of psychology, including social cognitive theory, therapy, and personality psychology, and was also influential in the transition between behaviorism and cognitive psychology. He is known as the originator of social learning theory and the theoretical construct of self-efficacy, and is...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionPsychologist
Date of Birth4 December 1925
CountryCanada
Albert Bandura quotes about
Convictions that outcomes are determined by one's own actions can be either demoralizing or heartening, depending on the level of self-judged efficacy. People who regard outcomes as personally determined, but who lack the requisite skills, would experience low self-efficacy and view the activities with a sense of futility
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
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
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
The performances of others are often selected as standards for self-improvement of abilities
Perceived self-efficacy and beliefs about the locus of outcome causality must be distinguished
People judge their capabilities partly by comparing their performances with those of others
Reasonably accurate appraisal of one's own capabilities is, therefore, of considerable value in successful functioning. Large misjudgments of personal efficacy in either direction have consequences. People who grossly overestimate their capabilities undertake activities that are clearly beyond their reach. As a result, they get themselves into considerable difficulties, undermine their credibility, and suffer needless failures. Some of the missteps, of course, can produce serious, irreparable harm
People behave agentically, but they produce theories that afford people very little agency
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
Behavior must also be adequately assessed under appropriate circumstances. Ill-defined global measures of perceived self-efficacy or defective assessments of performance will yield discordances. Disparities will also arise when efficacy is judged for performances in actual situations but performance is measured in simulated situations that are easier to deal with than the actualities
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 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
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