Self-efficacy, a concept introduced by psychologist Albert Bandura, refers to an individual’s belief in their capacity to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance outcomes. It’s the confidence in one’s ability to influence events and control over one’s environment.
Key Takeaways
- Psychologist Albert Bandura has defined self-efficacy as people’s belief in their ability to control their functioning and events that affect their lives.
- One’s sense of self-efficacy can provide the foundation for motivation, well-being, and personal accomplishment.
- People’s beliefs in their efficacy are developed by four primary sources of influence, including (i) mastery experiences, (ii) vicarious experiences, (iii) social persuasion, and (iv) emotional states.
- High self-efficacy has numerous benefits to daily life, such as resilience to adversity and stress, healthy lifestyle habits, improved employee performance, and educational achievement.
- It differs from self-esteem, which is more about overall self-worth. Self-efficacy focuses on capability in particular domains (e.g., academic tasks, athletic pursuits, work projects).
- Efficacy and Performance Shape Each Other: Research following people over time finds that self-efficacy and performance influence one another, with prior performance predicting later self-efficacy beliefs more strongly than the reverse.
The term self-efficacy was first coined by psychologist Albert Bandura (1977), a Canadian-American psychologist and a professor at Stanford University.
He described the concept as a personal judgment of “how well one can execute courses of action required to deal with prospective situations”.
In simpler terms, self-efficacy is a person’s belief in their ability to succeed in a particular situation (Bandura, 1977).
How does Self-Efficacy influence behaviour?
Perceived self-efficacy shapes behaviour in several ways. It determines whether people even attempt to cope with a situation.
People tend to avoid threats that feel beyond their coping skills, and engage confidently with situations they feel capable of handling. Self-efficacy also shapes thought patterns and emotional reactions.
Those with low self-efficacy tend to dwell on their deficiencies and magnify potential difficulties, which raises stress and impairs performance.
Those with high self-efficacy instead focus attention and effort on the task itself, treating obstacles as challenges that spur greater effort.
Self-efficacy also shapes self-regulation: how much effort someone expends, how long they persevere through difficulty, and how well they bounce back from setbacks.
People with strong self-efficacy tend to:
- Embrace difficult tasks as opportunities to learn.
- Recover quickly from setbacks.
- Attribute failure to insufficient effort or poor strategy (things they can change).
- Have lower stress and are less likely to develop depression.
People with low self-efficacy tend to:
- Avoid challenging tasks or give up easily.
- Focus on weaknesses and negative outcomes.
- Believe failures are due to lack of ability (a fixed trait).
- Experience higher stress and are more vulnerable to depression.
How Does Self-Efficacy Develop?
Source: The Pennsylvania State University
Albert Bandura (1977) states individuals develop their self-efficacy beliefs by interpreting information from four main sources of influence.
Bandura identified four main sources of self-efficacy:
- Performance Outcomes (Mastery Experiences): Successful mastery of tasks is the most powerful source of self-efficacy information. Experiencing success strengthens beliefs in one’s capabilities, while repeated failures tend to undermine them.
- Vicarious Experiences: Observing others (models) perform tasks successfully can raise observers’ beliefs in their own ability to perform the same tasks, especially if they perceive the model as similar to themselves.
- Verbal Persuasion: Being told by others that one possesses the capabilities to succeed can enhance self-efficacy. However, the persuasiveness of this source depends on the credibility, expertise, and trustworthiness of the persuader.
- Physiological and Emotional Arousal: Physiological states, such as anxiety or stress, can influence perceived self-efficacy. High arousal in threatening situations is often interpreted as an indicator of vulnerability, which can lower self-efficacy. Conversely, managing and reducing stress can enhance efficacy beliefs.
1. Mastery Experiences (Performance Outcomes)
Mastery experience is the strongest source of self-efficacy: successfully taking on a new challenge gives direct proof of capability.
Nothing builds belief in your own skills like achieving something firsthand. Each success, especially one that overcomes something that previously felt intimidating, boosts confidence and strengthens what you believe you can do.
Not every attempt succeeds immediately, and early setbacks can damage self-efficacy before confidence is established. But failure is not always negative: pushing through early struggles to eventual success builds especially strong, rewarding belief that perseverance pays off.
Navigating setbacks successfully can create even stronger self-belief than never facing difficulty at all.
Building Resilient Self-Efficacy Through Practice
People who persist through challenges develop resilient self-efficacy, strong enough to withstand future setbacks. Practice builds this resilience because it is the clearest path to mastery.
Practising regularly proves to you, often without realising it, that you have what it takes to succeed. Each successful practice session reinforces your self-belief, creating a positive cycle of growing confidence.
Mastery experiences, personal achievements gained through effort and perseverance, offer the most convincing proof of your capabilities. They carry more weight than watching others succeed (vicarious experience) or hearing encouragement (verbal persuasion), because they prove firsthand what you can do.
2. Vicarious Experiences (Social Role Models)
The second important source of self-efficacy is the vicarious experiences provided by social models.
Simply put, this involves learning by watching others successfully complete tasks, especially tasks you find challenging or intimidating.
Bandura (1977) explains that “seeing people similar to oneself succeed by sustained effort raises observers’ beliefs that they too possess the capabilities to master comparable activities.”
Who Are Our Role Models?
Role models can be anyone you relate to or look up to, including:
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Older siblings or friends
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Teachers and coaches
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Parents, grandparents, or relatives
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Supervisors or colleagues at work
When these role models display confidence and success, especially in tasks you find difficult, you naturally begin to adopt some of their self-belief.
How Do Vicarious Experiences Work?
Watching someone else perform a difficult or feared task successfully gives you a mental blueprint. You see that challenges can be overcome through perseverance and effective strategies, building the expectation that similar effort will work for you too.
Observing others is helpful, but it’s typically not as powerful as achieving success yourself. Personal accomplishment gives stronger, more lasting confidence because you’ve directly proven your own capability.
How you interpret what you see matters as much as what you see. If you doubt yourself, you might dismiss a role model’s success as down to special skills you lack. But if you view their success as achievable through effort and persistence, your own self-efficacy grows.
When Are Vicarious Experiences Most Effective?
Several factors influence how strongly you benefit from watching others:
- Effort and Persistence Shown by the Model: Role models who visibly struggle before succeeding are the most inspiring. They show that setbacks are normal and can be managed through effort, keeping you motivated through your own difficulties.
- Similarity to the Model: You’re more likely to believe in your own potential when a role model shares your background or skills. Someone very different succeeding may not boost your confidence as much.
- Clear and Diverse Examples: Role models who clearly show the results of their effort, and several different people succeeding rather than just one, both strengthen your belief that success is achievable for you too.
- Practical Skills and Strategies: Watching others manage difficult tasks does not just build confidence. It can also teach practical skills, such as staying calm under pressure or solving problems step by step.
3. Verbal Persuasion
Verbal persuasion means receiving encouragement, positive feedback, or reassurance from others about your ability to succeed at a task or handle a situation.
Receiving positive verbal feedback while undertaking a complex task persuades a person to believe that they have the skills and capabilities to succeed.
Self-efficacy is shaped by encouragement and discouragement about an individual’s performance or ability to perform (Bandura, 1977a).
Think of a coach telling an athlete, “You’ve trained hard; you’ve got this!” or a teacher reassuring a student, “You’re capable of great things, keep going!”
Such encouragement can boost your confidence and motivate greater effort, especially on challenging tasks. When someone you trust expresses confidence in your abilities, you find it easier to believe in yourself and persist through setbacks. Over time, that extra effort often leads to real success, which reinforces your belief in your own capabilities.
How to Make Encouragement Effective
Not all encouragement is equally effective. Here’s what matters most:
- Realistic and Genuine: Encouragement should be believable and specific; empty praise that isn’t backed by real success tends to backfire, making the recipient doubt future feedback.
- Credibility of the Encourager: Feedback carries the most weight when it comes from someone you see as trustworthy and knowledgeable, such as a respected coach or teacher, rather than a casual compliment.
- Timing and Specificity: Feedback works best when it names what you did well and how to improve, for example: “You did really well here, and you can do even better by trying this next time.”
- Combined with Practical Support: Encouragement works best paired with real tools or resources; being told you can succeed without the means to do so can set you up for disappointment.
Limits of Verbal Persuasion
Encouragement boosts confidence, but it’s generally less powerful than personal experience of success. Direct achievement provides clearer proof of your capabilities, so verbal encouragement alone can quickly lose its impact once you face setbacks.
Even so, encouragement still plays an important role, especially when you’re uncertain or new to a task. Positive feedback can motivate you to take the first step and keep going despite difficulties.
Encouragement works best combined with real opportunities to succeed: hearing supportive feedback, then actually achieving your goals through practice, builds stronger, more resilient belief in your abilities over time.
4. Emotional and Physiological States
Your emotional, physical, and psychological well-being can influence how capable you feel in a given situation.
For example, struggling with depression or anxiety can make that sense of well-being harder to sustain. Even so, self-efficacy is not impossible to build under these struggles: it’s simply easier when you feel healthy and well (Bandura, 1982).
It’s All About How You Interpret Your Feelings
Psychologist Albert Bandura noted that how strongly you feel an emotion, such as nervousness or excitement, matters less than how you interpret it. Imagine feeling your heart race, your palms sweat, and butterflies in your stomach before an important presentation.
If you doubt yourself, you might read these sensations as proof you’re unprepared, which raises anxiety and lowers self-confidence.
But with higher self-efficacy, you might read the same sensations as natural excitement, an energy boost that helps you perform at your best. The physical reaction is the same either way; your mindset transforms how you experience and use that energy.
Imaginal Experiences/Visualization
Bandura wasn’t the only psychologist to delve into researching self-efficacy. One example of another influential self-efficacy researcher is James Maddux, who is actually responsible for suggesting the existence of a fifth main source of self-efficacy: imaginal experiences, or visualization (Maddux and Meier, 1995).
Imaginal experiences, or visualisation, mean picturing yourself behaving successfully, as if the goal is already within reach. To build self-efficacy this way, picture success vividly and let it feel like the most likely outcome (Maddux & Meier, 1995).
Maddux and Meier (1995) proposed that picturing yourself or others succeeding raises self-efficacy, because visualising success makes people more ready to believe in themselves.
Improving Self-Efficacy
People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed property; there is huge variability in how you perform.
People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failure; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong (Bandura, 1977b).
1. Goal Setting
Setting clear, challenging goals keeps you motivated and improves performance: goals guide your actions and give you a benchmark for measuring progress and satisfaction.
Long-term goals, such as earning a degree or starting a new career, are inspiring but can feel overwhelming. Their distance makes it hard to stay motivated or notice progress along the way.
Breaking a large goal into smaller, achievable proximal goals solves this.
Each one acts as a stepping stone, offering an immediate incentive, clear direction, and a sense of achievement that keeps motivation alive.
The Power of Proximal Goals
Each time you reach a subgoal, you feel a sense of accomplishment. These frequent, small successes build your confidence and self-efficacy. Research shows that repeated small victories strengthen self-belief enough to help you persist through setbacks (Bandura & Schunk, 1981).
Short-term goals also make progress easier to judge. Without them, performance is hard to judge and motivation fades quickly. Regularly hitting small milestones helps you track improvement and feel more competent. That satisfaction sustains both your motivation and your belief in reaching bigger goals down the road.
2. Emphasize Peer Modeling
Learning from role models happens at any age: a teacher can model behaviour for a student, just as a supervisor can model it for an employee.
This is especially true for children, and works best when a child’s direct peers, such as siblings, parents, teachers, or friends, set the example (Bandura, 1988). In simple terms, peer modelling happens when someone shows good social behaviour and helps pass those values on to someone else.
In a work setting, one employee might take the lead for the week, showing strong skills and good social behaviour.
That employee becomes a peer model: colleagues want to learn how to act the way they do, especially once that behaviour brings success or earns praise.
3. Seek Feedback
Some people assume that no feedback means they’re doing well, hence the common phrase “no feedback is great feedback.” In fact, well-intentioned feedback, delivered the right way, is one of the most important sources of self-efficacy.
Employees and students alike want to know how they’re doing. For feedback to work, it needs to be both frequent and specific: without frequency, people lose track of whether they’re on the right path; without specificity, they don’t know what to fix.
Self-efficacy and subsequent task performance improve after receiving higher, more detailed levels of performance feedback (Beattie, Woodman, Fakehy, & Dempsey, 2016).
4. Encourage Participation
Participation is essential in any environment: it keeps people active and engaged, qualities that strongly influence self-efficacy. This matters especially at an early age, since students who engage in class are more active learners and absorb more of the material. Active participation is also linked to stronger critical and higher-level thinking skills.
Participation is also a key quality of a peer model: someone who has already engaged in active learning can teach others the same way. Thinking through a participatory activity goes beyond simply understanding the material; it engages both the person doing it and the people watching.
Participation also helps students learn from each other, and people tend to build self-efficacy based on how those closest to them behave.
5. Allow People to Make Their Own Choices
Letting people make their own choices builds self-accountability. Making your own decisions, for better or worse, means you feel responsible for the outcome, whether you succeeded through skill or fell short through your own mistakes.
Self-accountability matters for another reason too: making your own choices means you can make your own mistakes and, most importantly, learn from them. Advice is not the same as a command. Someone can advise you, but it’s your own responsibility what you do with that advice.
This is why a peer, although helpful, is not enough. In the end, if you want to learn from a model, only you can take the action yourself.
6. How to Use Emotions and Physical States to Boost Self-Efficacy
So how can you shift your mindset and improve your self-efficacy, even when you’re feeling anxious or stressed?
Here are a few helpful strategies:
- Reframe Your Anxiety as Excitement: Anxiety can be a sign that something matters to you. Reminding yourself that these feelings are normal, even helpful, can turn anxiety into motivation.
- Manage Your Stress and Mood: Stress-management techniques such as deep breathing, mindfulness, or relaxation exercises calm your physical responses, making it easier to stay confident under pressure.
- Focus on Situational Factors, Not Personal Flaws: Instead of reading a racing heart or tension as personal inadequacy, attribute it to the situation, such as the pressure of a high-stakes moment. This reduces negative self-judgement and protects your self-confidence.
- Stay Physically Healthy: Regular exercise, good sleep, and balanced nutrition reduce stress and anxiety, giving you a stronger foundation for self-efficacy.
Examples of Self-Efficacy
High self-efficacy has been linked with numerous benefits to daily life, including resilience to adversity and stress, healthy lifestyle habits, better employee performance, and stronger educational achievement.
1. Healthy Habits
Health psychologists emphasize that people are more likely to consistently engage in healthy behaviors when they believe they have the ability to succeed (Bandura, 1988).
A large meta-analysis by Sheeran and colleagues (2016) went further, pooling health-behaviour experiments that directly manipulated self-efficacy.
It found that interventions which successfully raised self-efficacy produced significant changes in both health intentions and actual behaviour, experimental evidence that efficacy is a genuine lever on conduct, not just something that happens to correlate with it.
For example, imagine someone who wants to become physically fit. If this person has high self-efficacy, they feel confident enough to set realistic fitness goals and keep attending workouts even when motivation wanes. Each successful workout reinforces their confidence and improves their overall physical and mental well-being.
Similarly, self-efficacy can help people adopt other healthy choices, such as eating well, losing weight, or quitting smoking.
Believing in your own capability turns a daunting lifestyle change into a series of achievable steps, making lasting habits more likely to stick.
2. Academic Success
Research by van Dinther and colleagues (2011) highlights a strong connection between self-efficacy and educational outcomes. Students who believe in their academic capabilities tend to use more effective learning strategies, set meaningful goals, and ultimately achieve higher academic performance.
A more recent systematic review by Honicke and Broadbent (2016), integrating 59 studies of university students, confirmed that academic self-efficacy is moderately related to performance.
It also identified the mechanism: much of that link runs through effort regulation, deep processing of material, and goal-setting, the study strategies that efficacy beliefs encourage.
For instance, a college student with high academic self-efficacy might approach studying strategically by organizing their coursework, actively participating in class, and confidently tackling difficult assignments or exams. This proactive attitude, driven by their belief in their ability, results in better grades and a more fulfilling educational experience.
In short, students with strong self-efficacy don’t just dream about academic success—they actively create it through disciplined and focused behaviors.
3. Treating Phobias
Bandura’s (1977a) snake-phobia study is the founding demonstration of self-efficacy theory, later elaborated in Bandura (1982).
Aim: To test whether treatments that build direct mastery raise self-efficacy, and behaviour, more powerfully than watching someone else succeed.
Method: Adults with a severe, long-standing snake phobia were assigned to participant modelling, vicarious modelling (observing the model only), or no treatment.
In participant modelling (guided mastery), a therapist first models handling a boa constrictor, then guides the client to touch and handle it in progressively harder steps.
Before and after treatment, participants rated task by task whether they believed they could perform each of a graded series of interactions with the snake, and their actual approach behaviour was recorded.
Results: Participant modelling produced the highest self-efficacy and the most approach behaviour. Crucially, each person’s efficacy rating for a specific task closely predicted whether they went on to attempt and complete that exact task, more accurately than the treatment condition or prior performance alone.
Conclusion: Self-efficacy is the proximal cognitive mechanism behind behavioural change, and direct mastery is the most powerful way to build it.
This task-by-task matching between belief and behaviour is hard to explain except through an efficacy mechanism, and it underpins exposure-based treatments.
But the study used a single, circumscribed animal phobia, and because efficacy and performance were so tightly linked, it cannot alone rule out that efficacy was partly read off from performance rather than causing it.
Can Self-Efficacy generalize across different situations?
Self-efficacy is usually specific to a task or situation, but confidence built in one area can help you feel more capable in other, seemingly unrelated areas too.
This happens most often when the tasks share underlying skills: someone great at organising and problem-solving at work might feel more confident applying those same skills at home, planning events or managing household tasks.
This transfer also happens because our minds naturally look for patterns.
Even when tasks look very different on the surface, recognising similar demands can help your confidence carry over from one context to another.
Our core beliefs about ourselves, what psychologists call self-schemas, also play a role: seeing yourself as someone who consistently handles challenges well makes it easier to maintain strong self-efficacy across situations.
In other words, confidence built in one area can ripple outward, helping you feel capable in many areas of life.
How is Self-Efficacy Measured?
Self-efficacy is your belief in your ability to succeed at specific tasks or situations, and psychologists measure it by asking people how confident they feel in their skills.
Because self-efficacy is specific, measurements need to closely match the task or area being evaluated. Some assessments focus on a specific action, such as confidence in solving one maths problem; others look more broadly at an entire domain, such as academic settings or healthy habits.
When measuring self-efficacy, researchers typically consider three main aspects:
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Level: How confident you feel handling tasks from easy to challenging.
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Strength: How strongly you believe in your capability.
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Generality: How widely your confidence applies across different situations or tasks.
In practice, psychologists often use surveys or questionnaires.
Participants rate their belief in their abilities, usually on a scale from 0 (not at all confident) to 100 (completely confident).
This provides a clear, practical picture of someone’s self-efficacy across various activities within a specific area of their life.
General Self-Efficacy Scale
The General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSE) was developed by Ralf Schwarzer and Matthias Jerusalem. It has just 8 items, each rated from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).
- “I will be able to achieve most of the goals that I have set for myself”
- “When facing difficult tasks, I am certain that I will accomplish them”
- “In general, I think that I can obtain outcomes that are important to me”
- “I believe I can succeed at most any endeavor to which I set my mind”
- “I will be able to successfully overcome many challenges”
- “I am confident that I can perform effectively on many different tasks”
- “Compared to other people, I can do most tasks very well”
- “Even when things are tough, I can perform quite well.”
Scores are calculated by averaging all eight responses, giving a score between 1 and 5. The higher the score, the greater the person’s self-efficacy.
Self-Efficacy and Related Ideas
Self-efficacy refers to a person’s belief in their ability to perform a specific task or behaviour successfully. It is a key concept within social cognitive theory, distinct from broader concepts like self-esteem or self-concept.
Self-concept is a more general evaluation of self that includes feelings of self-worth; it can be domain-specific but not task-specific. Self-efficacy, by contrast, is a context-specific judgment of one’s capability to achieve a specific outcome. For example, someone might hold a positive academic self-concept overall, yet have low self-efficacy for passing one particular difficult exam.
Self-efficacy judgments are typically measured at a microanalytic level, focusing on specific tasks and situations, which is why they predict behaviour so strongly.
Self-esteem vs. Self-efficacy
Self-esteem is your overall sense of self-worth: how much you value yourself as a person. It’s a broad feeling that doesn’t usually change much from one task to another.
Self-efficacy, by contrast, is your belief in your ability to succeed at a specific task or goal, and unlike self-esteem, it can vary greatly depending on the situation.
Consider a quick example. Someone who isn’t very good at horse riding would probably have low self-efficacy for riding: they doubt their ability to perform well. But if riding isn’t important to how they see themselves, their overall self-esteem probably wouldn’t be affected.
On the flip side, someone might be a very skilled rider yet still have low self-esteem. This can happen if they hold themselves to very high personal standards, or depend heavily on riding for their sense of worth, so that they feel they are never quite good enough, however skilled they are.
Here’s how these concepts differ clearly:
- Self-efficacy is your belief in your ability to perform a specific action or succeed in a particular situation. For example, you might feel confident speaking publicly about a favourite hobby, yet doubt yourself discussing an unfamiliar topic in front of a critical audience.
- Self-esteem is more general: it reflects your overall feelings about yourself, how positively or negatively you view yourself across every part of life.
Another important difference involves feelings of worth:
- Self-efficacy is not about how good or bad you feel about yourself: it’s simply your belief that you can achieve something. You can be confident in your maths skills without feeling proud of them, or basing your sense of worth on them.
- Self-esteem, however, always includes that evaluative component: how positively you see yourself, and how worthy you feel as a person.
Finally, these beliefs develop differently:
- Self-efficacy is mostly shaped through direct experiences of success (mastery), observing others (vicarious learning), receiving encouragement (verbal persuasion), and managing emotional responses (stress or anxiety). Mastery experiences, like succeeding at tasks, are especially powerful.
- Self-esteem tends to develop through broader comparisons: comparing yourself with others (social comparison), or comparing your own performance across different areas of your life.
Understanding these differences can help you recognize how each contributes uniquely to your overall confidence, motivation, and sense of well-being.
Confidence vs. Self-Efficacy
When Albert Bandura introduced self-efficacy in the 1970s, he was careful to separate it from the broader, everyday idea of confidence. The two terms might sound similar, but they describe different things.
Confidence refers to your general strength of belief: how certain you feel about something. But it’s often vague. You can be confident you’ll succeed just as easily as you can be confident you’ll fail, and confidence alone doesn’t say what you’re capable of.
Self-efficacy, by contrast, is more precise. It describes your belief in your ability to perform a specific task or handle a particular situation.
For example, you might feel confident presenting a work project because you trust your preparation. In other words, self-efficacy is not general reassurance: it’s confidence tied to performing one specific action.
Think of it this way:
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Confidence: “I generally feel good about how I handle things.”
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Self-efficacy: “I know I can deliver a great presentation because I’ve prepared thoroughly.”
Another important distinction is how each affects our behavior:
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High self-efficacy encourages you to view tough tasks as exciting challenges, boosting your motivation and commitment. Successfully meeting these challenges can, in turn, lead to increased confidence overall.
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General confidence, while helpful, doesn’t necessarily tell you whether you feel capable of completing a specific action effectively.
In short, confidence gives you a general feeling of assurance. Self-efficacy provides the targeted belief in your capability, one that drives your motivation, persistence, and success in specific areas of your life.
Motivation vs. Self-Efficacy
At first glance, motivation and self-efficacy might seem similar, but they are two distinct ideas that shape behaviour differently.
Motivation is your desire or drive to reach a goal, the inner energy that pushes you to act.
It’s the reason you get out of bed and start your day.
Self-efficacy, on the other hand, is your belief in your ability to achieve a specific goal or complete a particular task. It’s the confidence that you have the skills and resources to face the day and handle whatever comes your way.
People who feel highly capable often have strong motivation too, and vice versa, but the two are not the same thing. You might want something badly (high motivation), yet doubt your ability to get it (low self-efficacy). So you hesitate to start, or give up quickly when things get tough.
The reverse also works: believing strongly in your ability boosts motivation. Each successful task raises your confidence, which in turn strengthens motivation to take on even bigger challenges.
How Does Self-Efficacy Fit with Other Theories of Motivation?
Psychologists place self-efficacy alongside other motivational concepts to help explain how people behave and succeed:
- Intrinsic Interest: Feeling skilled and competent boosts intrinsic motivation, the pleasure you get from an activity itself. Meeting smaller goals along the way brings satisfaction and fuels a positive cycle of motivation and performance.
- Attribution Theory: This explains how your beliefs about why you succeeded or failed shape your future motivation. People with high self-efficacy blame setbacks on changeable factors like effort or strategy and keep trying; people with low self-efficacy blame a lack of ability and lose motivation.
- Expectancy-Value Theory: This theory holds that motivation depends on how likely you think success is and how much you value the goal. Self-efficacy sharpens this, since many valuable goals go unpursued simply because people doubt their own capability.
Learning Activity
Develop a measure of self-efficacy for any health-related behavior that avoids the confounding of self-efficacy with related constructs such as confidence or motivation.
Health-related behaviors include:
- Smoking cessation
- Alcohol use
- Eating
- Pain control
- Exercise
Design an intervention program that will enhance self-efficacy for a health-related behavior and a research design to measure changes in self-efficacy.
Criticisms and Limitations of Self-Efficacy Theory
Self-efficacy theory has strong research support, but it is not without criticism. Three issues stand out: the direction of cause and effect, the risk of overconfidence, and how far the theory applies across cultures.
1. Direction of Causation
Much of the supporting evidence is correlational, so high self-efficacy and success may reinforce each other rather than efficacy simply causing success.
Vancouver, Thompson, Tischner, and Putka (2002) tested this directly. Across repeated trials of a problem-solving task, they measured each participant’s self-efficacy before every attempt.
Between people, higher self-efficacy still predicted better performance, as the wider literature suggests. But within a single person, feeling more efficacious than usual predicted slightly worse performance next time, consistent with overconfidence breeding complacency.
A larger, more recent analysis has since qualified this finding rather than overturned it. Talsma, Schüz, Schwarzer, and Norris (2018) pooled eleven longitudinal studies, around 2,700 participants in total, tracking academic self-efficacy and performance over time.
Prior performance predicted later self-efficacy far more strongly than prior self-efficacy predicted later performance, supporting a two-way relationship in which performance is the stronger driver.
Together, the two studies suggest self-efficacy is partly a product of past performance, not only a cause of future success.
2. Overconfidence and Miscalibration
Miscalibration means an efficacy belief that has run ahead of real capability. Bandura noted that self-efficacy is most useful when it slightly exceeds current ability, giving the person a stretch to grow into; when the gap grows too large, it stops helping and starts working against them.
In practice, someone with inflated self-efficacy may take on tasks well beyond their current competence, prepare too little because success already feels assured, or keep persisting with a strategy that is not working rather than switching to one that might.
This is consistent with Vancouver and colleagues’ (2002) finding that people who felt more efficacious than their own average went on to perform slightly worse on the next trial.
Feeling unusually capable appears to lower vigilance and effort in the moment, not just to reflect real ability accurately.
3. Cultural Bias
Self-efficacy theory grew out of an individualist, Western research tradition that treats personal agency, the sense that one’s own effort and choices drive outcomes, as the default. That framing is not neutral: it may fit some cultural contexts more comfortably than others.
Klassen (2004) compared South Asian immigrant and Anglo-Canadian adolescents and found real differences in how efficacy beliefs were calibrated and what they correlated with.
This is evidence that the construct does not operate identically across cultural groups even when the same questionnaire items are used.
Collectivist cultures may weight collective efficacy, a group’s shared belief in what it can achieve together (Bandura, 1997), more heavily than personal efficacy, so a scale built around individual capability may be measuring the less important belief for that context.
The evidence here is thinner than for the theory’s other criticisms: it rests on cross-sectional, correlational comparisons rather than the meta-analyses and longitudinal studies that support the rest of the theory, so it should be read as provisional.
References
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Bandura, A. (1997b). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: Freeman.
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Gaumer Erickson, A.S., Soukup, J.H., Noonan, P.M., & McGurn, L. (2016). Self-Efficacy Questionnaire. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas. Center for Research on Learning.
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Further Reading
- Bandura: Self-Efficacy
- Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective
- Health promotion by social cognitive means
- Perceived behavioral control, self-efficacy, locus of control, and the theory of planned behavior
- Perceived self-efficacy in cognitive development and functioning
- Self-efficacy: A theoretical analysis of its determinants and malleability
- Self-efficacy and work-related performance: A meta-analysis
- Self-Efficacy: An Essential Motive to Learn
- Self-efficacy and the stages of exercise behavior change
