Self-belief does not necessarily ensure success, but self-disbelief assuredly spawns failure.

This has increased with the tremendous technological advances in communications. We have a vast new world of images brought into our sitting rooms electronically. Most of the images of reality on which we base our actions are really based on vicarious experience. This has increased with the tremendous technological advances in communications. We have a vast new world of images brought into our sitting-rooms electronically.

Persons who have a strong sense of efficacy deploy their attention and effort to the demands of the situation and are spurred by obstacles to greater effort.

When actions are followed by events that are not causally related to the prior acts, people often erroneously perceive contingencies that do not, in fact, exist

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

People with high assurance in their capabilities approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided.

If you look at our theories of social pathology and then at the dismal conditions in which children grow up in our ghettos, you would predict that all of them would be on drugs or psychological basket cases. Yet if you use criteria like gainful employment, forming partnerships and life without crime, you will find that most of those kids make it.