People who are insecure about themselves will avoid social comparisons that are potentially threatening to their self-esteem

Self-percepts foster actions that generate information, as well as serve as a filtering mechanism for self-referent information in the self-maintaining process

When people are not aiming for anything in particular or when they cannot monitor their performance, there is little basis for translating perceived efficacy into appropriate magnitudes of effort

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

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

Very often we developed a better grasp of the subjects than the over worked teachers.

The difficulty in judging what type of behavior works well arises not only because a given course of action does not always produce the outcomes. Similar outcomes can occur for reasons other than the person's actions, which further complicates inferential judgment. Effects that arise independently of one's actions distort the influence of similar effects produced by the actions, but only on some occasions. Given a strong cognitive set to perceive regularities, even chance joint occurrences of events can be easily misjudged as genuine relationships of low contingent probability