Once established, reputations do not easily change.

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

Moreover, joint occurrences tend to be better recalled than instances when the effect does not occur. The proneness to remember confirming instances, but to overlook disconfirming ones, further serves to convert, in thought, coincidences into causalities.

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

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

Incongruities between self-efficacy and action may stem from misperceptions of task demands, as well as from faulty self-knowledge

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