The presence of many interacting influences, including the attainments of others, create further leeway in how one's performances and outcomes are cognitively appraised

Success and failure are largely self-defined in terms of personal standards. The higher the self-standards, the more likely will given attainments be viewed as failures, regardless of what others might think.

In the self-appraisal of efficacy, there are many sources of information that must be processed and weighed through self-referent thought

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

Most of the images of reality on which we base our actions are really based on vicarious experience.

A problem of future research is to clarify how young children learn what type of social comparative information is most useful for efficacy evaluation

Self-appraisals of efficacy are reasonably accurate, but they diverge from action because people do not know fully what they will have to do, lack information for regulating their effort, or are hindered by external factors from doing what they can