1 Self-efficacy definitions
1.2 The role of Self-efficacy in mindset for learning
Learning theories tend to be concerned with the acquisition of knowledge (Cognitive issues) or execution of response patterns (Behavioral issues) to study performance on an activity. With SCT the discipline started to consider also how Self-referents mechanisms affect the acquisition of competence in a determined task.
There are two types of self-referent mechanisms that regulates human agency: self-reactiveness (outer-oriented) self-reflectiveness (inner-oriented) mechanisms. The first is related with the deliberative process of mind to make choices and give shape to the courses of actions and contains elements of psychological interest as affection, motivation and perceived outcomes. The second is associated with the ability to examine own functioning and evaluate own thoughts and actions, being principally explained by the individual’s self-efficacy level.
Self-efficacy an orchestration or continued improvisation of multiple skills to manage the ever-changing situation around mastering an activity. As part of the forethought element of human agency, Self-efficacy is not the simple self-perception about the ability to execute an action, is concerned by judgments of how well one can execute courses of action required to deal with prospective situations.
This concept was so important for Bandura because it occupies a pivotal role in the causal structure of development on Social Cognitive Theory as states that beliefs affect adaptation and change not only in their own right but through their impact on other determinants. i) Efficacy plays a central role in the self-regulation of motivation through goal challenges and outcome expectations. ii) Efficacy determines the challenge to undertake, how much effort to expend in the endeavor, how long to persevere in the face of obstacles and failure, and whether failures are motivating or demoralizing. iii) Efficacy beliefs also play a key role in shaping the courses lives take by influencing the types of activities and environments people choose to get into. In synthesis, efficacy shapes the mindset and the environment, crucial for reinforcing the mastery of the activity to which one is dedicated (Bandura, 1995; Steele & Aronson, 1995).
Debating human genetic-environmental determination, Bandura’s Self-efficacy concept states that learning or development exceeds inner capabilities. If one judges oneself as capable of managing new competencies, one can undertake them with better probabilities of achievement. In technical terms, self-efficacy is an internal mediator of the covariation between external or environmental factors and behavior or actions. Also, it is proved that self-efficacy could shape neuron network growth, so it’s a determinant for material-internal conditions of learning.
1.2.1 Self-efficacy lines of information
Self-efficacy is based on four lines of information individuals perceive:
Master experience. Success builds robust beliefs on self-efficacy. Failure undermines it, especially if it occurs before a sense of self-efficacy is firmly established. Inverse with quick results, which easily discourage if a failure appears.
Vicarious experience. Seeing people like oneself succeed through perseverant effort raises the observer’s belief that one, too, can master comparable activity. The inverse token occurs when observing similar people’s failures.
Social persuasion. Convince verbally that you don’t have the capabilities to master some given activities. Discouragement to mobilize effort and sustain it by instilling self-doubts about personal deficiencies resulting from other people’s influences.
Psychological and emotional states. Stress reaction and tension are signs of vulnerability and poor performance.
These sources of information are not inherently instructive for the individual. The result depends on their cognitive processing of them (Bandura, 1995). This may vary according to the psychological uniqueness of each person. Four mind mechanisms for processing this information:
Cognitive processing. Shape types of scenarios constructed and rehearse them. Visualizing failure or achieving goals of courses of action imagined.
Motivational processing. There are three elements that are used to understand how motivation is shaped. The first focuses on satisfaction with one performance based on personal attributes (Causal attributions/ Attribution theory). The second focuses on benefits or attainments achieved in the activity (Outcome expectancy/ Expectancy value theory). The third is based on a sense of personal progress in mastering the path (Recognized goals/ Goal theory).
Affective process. Efficacy affects potential threats and situations that are fraught with dangers. It can modify people’s sense of control. As more control is perceived, there is less anxiety about threats and coping with problematic situations.
Selection process. Efficacy depends on the types of activities and environment people choose to stay. This decision-making process also shapes the environment to increase/decrease Self-efficacy. As low self-efficacy, low aspiration to take difficult tasks, and less aspiration to take difficult tasks and present resilence coping them.
1.2.2 Types of Self-efficacy
Self-efficacy is a multidimensional concept that can be explored by different approaches. To propose thematic research around this concept, it’s necessary to distinguish between different types or perspectives.
Individual self-efficacy level differ on three distinct but interrelated judgements: Magnitude, Strength, and Generalizability2.
The Magnitude of self-efficacy refers to the level of task difficulty one believes is attainable. Individuals with a high self-efficacy magnitude might be expected to perceive themselves as able to accomplish more difficult computing tasks than those with lower self-efficacy judgments. Alternatively, self-efficacy magnitude might be gauged regarding support levels required to undertake a task.
Self-efficacy Strength refers to the level of conviction about personal judgment. It also reflects the resistance of self-efficacy to apparently disconfirming information. Individuals with a weak sense of self-efficacy will be frustrated more easily by obstacles to their performance and will respond by lowering their perceptions of their capability. By contrast, individuals with a strong sense of efficacy will not be deterred by difficult problems, will retain their sense of self-efficacy, and as a result of their continued persistence, are more likely to overcome whatever obstacle is present.
Self-efficacy Generalizability reflects the degree to which the judgment is limited to a particular domain of activity or not. For example, these domains might be considered to reflect different hardware and software configurations within a computing context. Thus, individuals with high computer self-efficacy generalizability would expect to be able to competently use different software packages and different computer systems, while those with low computer self-efficacy generalizability would perceive their capabilities as limited to particular software packages or computer systems.
Generally, Self-efficacy has two ways to be studied: As perceived capabilities for task achievement and as a self-regulatory attitude. Task self-efficacy involves the beliefs that one can or cannot perform a single instance of a circumscribed behavior at different levels of performance. Self-regulatory self-efficacy is the confidence in how one can (or could) achieve tasks in the context of potential barriers. Studies focusing on capabilities usually emphasize the magnitude of the task, i.e., its degree of difficulty or complexity, and the linear achievement of the masterization process. By contrast, studies focused on attitudinal aspects give greater importance to strength to keep self-efficacy levels in difficult contexts. The first approach questions the capability to reach higher and higher levels in the activity domain, and the second focuses on persistance or resistance in the face of adversities presented by an activity (Williams & Rhodes, 2016). Saying in a different way, Schwarzer & Renner (2000) distinguish between action self-efficacy as confidence that the subject can (or could) perform the behavior even when it requires setting goals and planning, and coping self-efficacy as confidence that the subject can (or could) perform the behavior even in the face of initial setbacks or lack of social support.
Some contributions to this debate suggest five types to classify self-efficacy constructs. What varies across these conceptualizations of self-efficacy is whether the perceived capability to perform the target behavior is to be judged in isolation (i.e., task self-efficacy) or under various conditions, such as in the context of potential barriers (i.e., self-regulatory efficacy), when initiating a new behavior (i.e., initiation self-efficacy), following relapse (i.e., recovery self-efficacy), or in the face of potentially stressful life events (i.e., coping self-efficacy) (Marlatt et al., 1995).
1.2.3 Several others
After these theoretical definitions, it’s important to note the empirical performance of the Self-efficacy variable. Bandura provides a lot of information that could be useful for our studies. First note. Self-efficacy doesn’t have a positive linear direction with performance. An individual with higher levels of self-efficacy could present lower levels of task achievement. The same with lower grades of self-efficacy. This is because performance and learning, as Social Cognitive Theory tries to defend, is a situated process, and this depends on context, personal attributes, or the specific nature of the task the individual imagines mastering. Self-efficacy covariation with competencies is tied to gender, age, the social groups around the environments, and so on (Bandura, 1995). 3
Second note. Self-efficacy is not only an important predictor of an individual’s competences, but also of the decisions he or she makes in life. In the formation period, the perception of boys’ and girls’ capabilities defines the careers they pursue or their interests and affiliative preferences. A person’s life path depends on competences, interests, and affiliative preferences, all of which are influenced by self-efficacy, especially on educational experience (Bandura, 1995).
Third note. Incentives are also important for explaining self-efficacy. In Social Cognitive Theory, interests grow from satisfactions derived from fulfilling internal standards and from perceiving self-efficacy obtained from performance accomplishments and other sources of efficacy information. By making self-satisfaction conditional on a certain level of performance mastery, people create self-incentives for their efforts (Bandura, 1995).
1.3 Bandura’s insights on measuring Self-efficacy
At the late stage of his large Self-efficacy research agenda, Bandura (2006) wrote a standard guide for constructing self-efficacy scales. In this text he takes over some critiques and suggestions around the years and tries to propose a definitive method for operationalize self-efficacy.
First Recommendation: Bandura claim that in human life people cannot mastery every realm of life. Self-efficacy differ by the given pursuits in the area in which it its developed. Thus, the efficacy belief system is not a global trait but a differentiated set of self-beliefs linked to distinct realms of functioning. Multidomain measures are necessary because it reveals the patterning and degree of generality of people’s sense of personal efficacy. There is no all-purpose measure of perceived self-efficacy. Scales of perceived self-efficacy must be tailored to the particular domain of functioning that is the object of interest.
Second recommendation: Efficacy items should accurately reflect the construct. Self-efficacy is concerned with perceived capability. The items should be phrased in terms of can do rather than will do. Can is a judgment of capability; will is a statement of intention.
Third recommendation: Perceived self-efficacy should also be distinguished from other constructs such as self-esteem, locus of control, and outcome expectancies. Perceived efficacy is a judgment of capability; self-esteem is a judgment of self-worth; locus of control is about outcome responsibility (one’s actions or external forces); and outcome expectancies are judgments on the results of the action, not about capabilities to do the action.
Fourth recommendation: A comprehensive self-efficacy assessment would be linked to the behavioral factors that influence people to exercise some control. Behavior is better predicted by people’s beliefs in their capabilities to do whatever is needed to succeed than by their beliefs in only one aspect of self-efficacy relevant to the domain. Thus, multifaceted efficacy scales not only have predictive utility but provide insights into the dynamics of self-management of behavior. If self-efficacy scales are targeted to factors that, in fact, have little or no impact on the domain of functioning, such research cannot yield a predictive relation. In short, self-efficacy scales must be tailored to activity domains and assess the multifaceted ways in which efficacy beliefs operate within the selected activity domain. The efficacy scales must be linked to factors that, in fact, determine quality of functioning in the domain of interest.
Fifth recommendation: Perceived efficacy should be measured against task demands that represent gradations of challenges or impediments to successful performance. Self-efficacy appraisals reflect the level of difficulty individuals believe they can surmount. If there are no obstacles to overcome, the activity is easily performable, and everyone is highly efficacious. The events over which personal influence is exercised can vary widely. It may entail regulating one’s own motivation, thought processes, performance level, emotional states, or altering environmental conditions. The nature of the challenges against which personal efficacy is judged will vary depending on the sphere of activity. Constructing scales to assess self-regulatory efficacy requires preliminary work to identify the forms the challenges and impediments take.
Sixth recommendation: The record of the strength of efficacy beliefs have to be on a 100-point scale, ranging in 10-unit intervals from 0 (“Cannot do”); through intermediate degrees of assurance, 50 (“Moderately certain can do”); to complete assurance, 100 (“Highly certain can do”). Scales that use only a few steps should be avoided because they are less sensitive and less reliable. People usually avoid the extreme positions so a scale with only a few steps may, in actual use, shrink to one or two points. Including too few steps loses differentiating information because people who use the same response category may differ if intermediate steps were included.
Seventh recommendation: Efficacy scales are unipolar, ranging from 0 to a maximum strength. They do not include negative numbers because a judgment of complete incapability (0) has no lower gradations. Bipolar scales with negative gradations below the zero point that one cannot perform a given level of activity do not make sense (Pajares et al., 2001).
Eigth recommendation: People are asked to judge their operative capabilities as of now, not their potential capabilities or their expected future capabilities. It is easy for people to imagine themselves to be fully efficacious in some hypothetical future.
1.4 Critiques of Bandura insights and others’ proposals
Altough Bandura has become a canonic author on Self-efficacy studies, not all of its categories are of absolute consensus in scientific debates. With the passage of time and the development of evidence, the perspectives with which the subject is approached have pluralized.
1.4.1 The grey area with self-reactiveness elements
In 1984, Cognitive Therapy and Research dedicated a special issue to Bandura’s thesis on self-efficacy. Some relevant scholars commented on Bandura’s theory’s limitations and confusing issues.
An article by Eastman & Marzillier (1984) on that issue said that Bandura’s definition of self-efficacy is fundamentally ambiguous regarding the distinction between self-efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. Separating acts (tasks) from outcomes, particularly in complex activities, is difficult in real-life experiences. Many behaviors involve a continuous interplay between actions and their outcomes, making it challenging to assess self-efficacy independently of outcome considerations. The authors express skepticism about the applicability of Bandura’s findings to everyday life, arguing that most psychological issues involve tasks and outcomes that are not clearly defined. They believe this complexity makes it difficult for individuals to assess their self-efficacy accurately.
This condition is traduced in empirical problems. The empirical studies conducted by Bandura often assess self-efficacy through tasks that are discrete and limited in scope, which may not adequately capture the broader complexities of real-life situations where multiple outcomes exist. The assessments of self-efficacy in Bandura’s studies do not account for the variability and unpredictability of outcomes that individuals might consider, thus failing to demonstrate that efficacy judgments can be made independently of outcome considerations (Marzillier & Eastman, 1984). 4
Recent contributions have indicated that the self-efficacy definition’s grey area with outcome expectations also affects its relation with motivational mechanisms of action. If individuals do not analytically distinguish, with utmost clarity, efficacy expectations from expected outcomes in action, it is likely that the degree of agency is mostly explained by the motivations that generate the outcomes rather than by perceived singular capabilities. In that sense, Self-efficacy would be an epiphenomenon of motivation rather than a determinant. However, if self-efficacy and motivation are intermingled, there would be confusion in distinguishing the agency’s self-reactiveness and self-reflectiveness moments that Bandura previously suggested (Williams & Rhodes, 2016).
As a result, Researchers on Self-efficacy indicate that the operationalization of the concept needs to avoid assessments that confound the judgments of efficacy and motivation of the action (Eastman & Marzillier, 1984; Williams & Rhodes, 2016). To rate the confidence in a target behavior, some assessments ask participants whether they would do the action or how confident they are to achieve it. This would be a better strategy than ‘can-do’ scale construction strategies. Kirsch (1995) explains there are two colloquial uses of the phrase can do. One meaning reflects perceived capability per se based on one’s estimation of their actual capability to perform a task (i.e. the original definition of efficacy expectancy as distinct from outcome expectancy). The second meaning reflects motivation based on—in his examples—anticipated “disgust, embarrassment, guilt, or shame”. The second would be a motivation measurement, not a self-efficacy one. The risk is to interpret “I can do [target behaviour]” as “I will do [target behavior]”.
The can/can’t do scale approach would be useful if Self-efficacy is measured as task self-efficacy, this is, focusing on the isolated task, with no context o background. But we know in complex activities this becomes difficult, so it’s better to opt for other strategies such as can-do-motivation one (“I could do it if I would like to do it”).
1.4.2 The general self-efficacy on Ralf Schwarzer
Is being reading…
1.4.3 Resonance and Self-efficacy
The resonance theory raised by Rosa (2019) is one of the principal theoretical contributions for actual sociology. The claim of Rosa is to re-found a sociological approximation that move from the resources and competence question to concern the last and principal problem for social sciences: The relations with the world and good life. In this sense, he takes up Bandura’s effort to think of psychotherapy in positive terms (not as a way of avoiding the pathological), and transfers it to sociology, especially to actual critical theory. Bandura’s self-efficacy is a conceptual pillar of this proposal.
In his book observes that the current research on self-efficacy use this concept to explain the expansion of resources and opportunities on individuals (Competences and achievements), but the same Bandura demonstrated that levels of intrinsic motivation with an activity doesn’t grow up with the raise of outcomes, but with the sense that world that the world becomes attainable and speaks to you through your own actions. If resonance theory is taken seriously, the decisive factor in understanding the variation in self-efficacy is not the results perceptions, but the interaction-process of the activity. Then, the increase or reach of individuals’ life chances should not be approximated by opportunities per-se, abstract if one will, but by opportunities to establish vibrant threads and meaningful relationships with the activity being evaluated.
References
Hereinafter, SCT↩︎
This Self-efficacy judgments were proposed by Brief & Aldag (1981) years ago but then recovered by Compeau & Higgins (1995) to study computer Self-efficacy, so I think it’s important to include them.↩︎
This insight support our first ICILS study, where we try to approach the under/overestimation phenomenon on digital Self-efficacy. Also, open possibilities to understand why Self-efficacy empirical studies tends to divide constructs on basic and specialized tasks; probably present different effects because of the nature of this concept.↩︎
I add this to the agenda review because I think could be useful for General and Specialized Digital Self-efficacy distinction. If one follow the argument, in General tasks there are more possibilities to discriminate between efficacy expectatives and outcome than on Specialized tasks.↩︎
1.1 Social Cognitive Theory on Psychological Debates
The concept of Self-efficacy cannot be well understood if it is not revised by the role that has on Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory1. This theory emerged to discuss behaviorist and computationalist psychological approaches to studying the human mind and learning process. In particular, this theory tried to focus on the human agency, which the other two currents of thought dealt with reductionism.
Learning has always been a debate in psychological theory. In the discipline’s early stages, the foundational principles embraced an input-output model of learning. The mechanism that the mind presents was not relevant for the empirical positivistic and behavioural perspective; the objective of psychology was reduced to studying action-reaction phenomena of human behavior. Behind this state, there was an assumption that the mind was a mechanical device, where the stimulations are received invariantly, so the input determines the subject’s response.
At first half of the XX century the mind started to be represented as an internal circuit with cognitive operations. In this context, computational thinking propose to treat human learning process same as a computer, this is a perform of complex operations to process information and give solutions to problems presented (inputs). In this way, the mind is a computer operating by pre-ordered rules saved in the neurological network (or hardware). A “throughput” was added to the mind.But the multifactorial dynamic computationalist position doesn’t give space for intention or will; opens the mind to learn about problems and make changes in the solution-making process, but reduce mind to a hiper-cognitive approach, which cannot explain decisions by affections, emotions, or imagination.
For both perspectives, behaviorists and computationalists, human agency is not present because, to assume agency, there has to be consciousness. The conscience supposes a self-generated purpose in the action. This contemplates not only cognitive operations but also a sense of life of the subject. Bandura’s intention of SCT was to not reduce the conscience activity to an epiphenomenal product of a sub-personal level. Bandura’s work tried not to ignore human prime features in psychology, such as subjectivity, deliberative self-guidance, and reflective self-reactiveness (Bandura, 2001). SCT undestand people acts on beliefs, goals, aspirations, and expectations, which are not fully explained by brain or environmental activity. People are agents of experience rather than simply undergoing their experience. We give meaning, direction and satisfaction to our lives. The core argument is that the consciousness elements can also change the brain and the environment. Neurons are plastic to our thinking. We are not only exposed to stimulation, but we agenting acting to it (Bandura, 2001).
To be considered as agentic, the act have to be done intentionally, with a representation of a future course of action to be performed, going beyond the inmediate enviroment and fitting the present to the future. The agency have a forethought property that enables the power to direct and plan actions to achieve intended outcomes. In that way, the actors have to be aware of the consequences of their actions.
This agentic perspective fosters a line of research to provide new insights into the social construction of the human brain. Our functional structure changes through our interactions and thoughts. The claim is to “bio-psycho-socialized” the human development. In SCT the mind is have emergent properties, is generative, not reactive. So there’s a double direction of complementation: By one way, integer human intentionality to behavior, for the other, try to limit sociostructural factors and see how it links with psychological mechanisms to produce behavioral effect. This is how Bandura arrives at the Triadical reciprocal causation model of action, where personal/internal factors (organic or mind-intended), Environmental influences and Behavioural patterns have bi-directional mutual determinations between them.