People behave agentically, but they produce theories that afford people very little agency.

People who underestimate their capabilities also bear costs, although, as already noted, these are more likely to take self-limiting rather than aversive forms. By failing to cultivate personal potentialities and constricting their activities, such persons cut themselves off from many rewarding experiences. Should they attempt tasks having evaluative significance, they create internal obstacles to effective performance by approaching them with unnerving self-doubts

It is no more informative to speak of self-efficacy in global terms than to speak of nonspecific social behavior

People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities.

[Attributional] factors serve as conveyors of efficacy information that influence performance largely through their intervening effects on self-percepts of efficacy

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

Regression analyses show that self-efficacy contributes to achievement behavior beyond the effects of cognitive skills