Moral justification is a powerful disengagement mechanism. Destructive conduct is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it in the service of moral ends. This is why most appeals against violent means usually fall on deaf ears.

In order to succeed, people need a sense of self-efficacy, to struggle together with resilience to meet the inevitable obstacles and inequities of life.

Once established, reputations do not easily change.

The satisfactions people derive from what they do are determined to a large degree by their self-evaluative standards

Humans are producers of their life circumstance not just products of them.

It is widely assumed that beliefs in personal determination of outcomes create a sense of efficacy and power, whereas beliefs that outcomes occur regardless of what one does result in apathy

Students judge how well they might do in a chemistry course from knowing how peers, who performed comparably to them in physics, fared in chemistry