Self-Efficacy

Self-efficacy refers to people’s beliefs in their ability to regulate their functioning and to organize and execute the courses of action required to manage environmental challenges and to achieve desired outcomes. The concept of self-efficacy is the cornerstone of personal agency in Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory. To be an agent means that the individual is able to act intentionally and exert self-influence. Individuals guide their lives by their beliefs of personal efficacy. Hence, when they do not believe that they can achieve a desired result with their actions they do not have much incentive to act.

Bandura rejected a view of the person as being passively driven either by sexual and aggressive drives or by external stimuli. Instead, he adopted an agentic perspective on human nature. According to this view, individuals are throughout their life-span contributors to their life situation and life trajectories and have control over their destinies. They are not onlookers of their own life.

Personal agency is a key concept also in contemporary theories of human development. Urie Bronfenbrenner argued that individuals exert their human agency, and thus influence their own development, within the opportunities and constraints of historical and social circumstances. Similarly, human agency is prominent in the study of lives through the lenses of the life-span perspective on human development and aging. These ideas are also integrated in the risk and resilience model of human development and in general in the field of developmental psychopathology. In this line, scientific evidence shows a strong longitudinal link between self-efficacy and individual adaptation. Self-efficacy beliefs play a key role in explaining why some individuals follow life pathways toward positive adaptation and mental health, whereas other individuals follow pathways toward psychological problems and/or adaptation difficulties.

This entry is organized into three sections. First, self-efficacy is examined in the context of social cognitive theory. Second, the development of self-efficacy beliefs, from infancy to old age, is briefly discussed. Third, the concept of self-efficacy is compared with other related concepts, namely self-esteem, locus of control, and effectance motivation.