7.3 Self-Efficacy and Human Agency

Self-efficacy and human agency are key concepts in cognitive learning theories. They focus on how our beliefs about our abilities shape our actions and outcomes. These ideas build on Bandura's social learning theory, expanding our understanding of motivation and behavior.

Self-efficacy is about believing in your ability to succeed. It's influenced by past successes, role models, encouragement, and emotional states. Human agency is our power to control our lives, individually or collectively. Both concepts highlight how our thoughts impact our actions.

Self-Efficacy

Developing Self-Efficacy

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• Self-efficacy refers to an individual's belief in their capacity to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance attainments
• Mastery experiences provide the most authentic evidence of one's ability to succeed and build a robust belief in one's personal efficacy
  • Successes build a strong belief in one's personal efficacy while failures undermine it, especially if failures occur before a sense of efficacy is firmly established
• Vicarious experiences provided by social models also influence self-efficacy
  • Seeing people similar to oneself succeed by sustained effort raises observers' beliefs that they too possess the capabilities to master comparable activities (role models)
• Verbal persuasion serves as a further means of strengthening people's beliefs that they possess the capabilities to achieve what they seek
  • People who are persuaded verbally that they possess the capabilities to master given activities are likely to mobilize greater effort and sustain it

Factors Influencing Self-Efficacy

• Emotional and physiological states influence how people judge their capablities
  • Positive mood enhances perceived self-efficacy while despondent mood diminishes it
  • Physiological indicators of efficacy play an influential role in health functioning and in athletic and other physical activities (increased heart rate before a competition)
• Self-efficacy beliefs influence how people feel, think, motivate themselves and behave
  • Cognitive processes: Self-efficacy beliefs affect thought patterns that can enhance or undermine performance (visualization of success scenarios)
  • Motivational processes: Self-efficacy beliefs play a central role in the self-regulation of motivation (setting challenging goals and maintaining strong commitment to them)
  • Affective processes: People's beliefs in their coping capabilities affect how much stress and depression they experience in threatening or difficult situations (coping with job loss)

Human Agency

Types of Human Agency

• Human agency refers to the capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality of one's life
• Personal agency is exercised individually when people influence their own functioning and environmental events
  • Enables individuals to play a part in their self-development, adaptation, and self-renewal with changing times (choosing a career path)
• Proxy agency relies on others to act on one's behest to secure desired outcomes
  • People do not have direct control over social conditions and institutional practices that affect their lives (relying on political representatives)
• Collective agency is exercised through socially coordinative and interdependent effort
  • People pool their knowledge, skills, and resources and act in concert to shape their future (team sports, social movements)

Factors Influencing Human Agency

• People's beliefs in their collective efficacy influence the type of futures they seek to achieve, how well they use their resources, how much effort they put into their group endeavor, and their staying power when collective efforts fail to produce quick results or meet forcible opposition
  • A group's attainments are the product not only of shared knowledge and skills of its different members, but also of the interactive, coordinative, and synergistic dynamics of their transactions (workplace collaboration)
• In many activities, people have to work together to secure what they cannot accomplish on their own
  • People's shared beliefs in their collective efficacy influence the type of futures they seek to achieve, how well they use their resources, how much effort they put into their group endeavor, and their staying power when collective efforts fail to produce quick results (community development projects)