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Subject Area: Political Theory

How Self-Efficacy Develops - Leonard P. Liggio, Literature of Liberty, Spring 1982, vol. 5, No. 1 [1982]

Edition used:

Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought was published first by the Cato Institute (1978-1979) and later by the Institute for Humane Studies (1980-1982) under the editorial direction of Leonard P. Liggio.

Part of: Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought, 20 vols. 19781-982

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


How Self-Efficacy Develops

Albert Bandura

  • Stanford University

“Self-Referent Thought: A Developmental Analysis of Self-Efficacy.” Gestalt Theory 2(1980): 147–174.

Self-efficacy involves judgments persons make as to how well they can organize and perform actions necessary for handling prospective situations that may contain many ambiguous, unpredictable and often stressful elements. These self-perceptions of efficacy influence personal choices of activities and environmental settings. People do what they think they can succeed in and avoid what they anticipate may lead to failure. They expend greater effort and persist longer when success is foreseen. Those with a strong sense of efficacy deploy their skills well to meet the demands of a situation and are spurred by any obstacles to greater effort.

Misjudgments of self-efficacy in either direction are likely to have adverse consequences. Too high an assessment of efficacy is likely to result in failure. Too low a self-assessment will prevent an individual from engaging in activities which they are fully capable of performing. “The accurate appraisal of one's own capabilities is highly advantageous and often essential for effective functioning.”

Self-knowledge about efficacy is gained through either personal or socially mediated experiences. There are four principal sources of information: (a) personal performance accomplishments, i.e., successes and failures, (b) vicarious experiences obtained through observing the successes and failures of others, (c) information provided about our abilities by others through verbal persuasion and similar types of social influence, and (d) states of personal physiological arousal from which people partly judge their capabilities and vulnerabilities. Each of these sources contributes in varying degrees to accurate and inaccurate judgments of self-efficacy.

The developmental beginnings of perceived personal efficacy occur in infants' experiences that certain actions produce certain repeatable and predictable environmental effects. Children quickly learn how to influence the actions of those around them. When the environmental events, including parental behaviors, are inconsistent and therefore unpredictable, there develops an impaired ability to perceive causal agency and a depressed responsiveness to later situations when personal action could produce more efficacious results. During each stage of a person's life-span, the experience of self-efficacy takes characteristic forms.

The theory of self-efficacy has important implications for parenting and for education. For example, with respect to the use of rewards, incentives contingent on improved performance can contribute to performance gains, growth of interest in the rewarded activity, and increased experiences of self-efficacy. In contrast, rewards given for undertaking an activity irrespective of the quality of performance result in a decrease in interest in the task and do not contribute to gains in self-efficacy.