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

Even noteworthy performance attainments do not necessarily boost perceived self-efficacy

Self efficacious children tend to attribute their successes to ability, but ability attributions affect performance indirectly through perceived self-efficacy

Given a sufficient level of perceived self-efficacy to take on threatening tasks, phobics perform them with varying amounts of fear arousal depending on the strength of their perceived self-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

Perceived self-efficacy influences the types of causal attributions people make for their performances

Psychology cannot tell people how they ought to live their lives. It can however, provide them with the means for effecting personal and social change.