Bandura 1977 - Self-efficacy - toward a unifying theory of behavioral change

Google Scholar Link

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological review, 84(2), 191.

todo: insert Fig 1 and 2 diagrams (with edits)

Interesting to compare to Azjen’s theory of planned behavior. Also seems related to Maier and Seligman’s learned helplessness (they actually do reference that paper).

Summary

An efficacy expectation is one’s conviction that one can successfully bring about a desired outcome. Outcome expectancy is broader as there are outcomes that we are unable to influence personally. A person’s efficacy expectations will cause them to behave in a certain way, based on their outcome expectations. This process could fail at any step. For example, a person might know that working out will lead to health (outcome expectation), but they might believe that they don’t have the willpower to workout (efficacy expectation). Efficacy expectations affect both initiation of outcome-expectant behavior and the persistence of that behavior.

Personal efficacy expectations are based on (1) performance accomplishments, (2) vicarious experience, (3) verbal persuasion, and (4) physiological states. Performance accomplishments refers to a person’s past experiences. Success increases efficacy expectations, while failure lowers it. Enough success can lead to expected success in new areas as well (not just experienced areas). Vicarious experience refers to observed experiences (called “modeled behavior”) - as evidenced by the author’s Bobo doll experiments. Vicarious experiences do not influence efficacy expectations as much as personal accomplishments. Verbal persuasion refers to persuasion by a third-party. Though widely used because of the ease of this method, it is also not as effective as personal experience (though the author doesn’t state this, I would guess that this is also less effective than vicarious experience). Finally, high arousal or positive emotion is more likely to increase efficacy expectations.

Application

This has a lot of application for exposure therapy (the author did experiments with people who had a snake phobia). This also has a lot of application for training within an organization. Training will be better if employees are placed in real scenarios, rather than simply role-playing. If vicarious experiences are used to increase self-efficacy, you shouldn’t try to hide the struggle of the person going through the experience. Start with small wins (establish success) and try to move on to bigger ones. If someone has high levels of failure in their past, more work is required to increase their self-efficacy. Underperformance could be due to an employee taking on a too-big job simply because the task wasn’t sufficiently explained up front.