The adequacy of performance attainments depends upon the personal standards against which they are judged

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

People not only gain understanding through reflection, they evaluate and alter their own thinking.

To grant thought causal efficacy is not to invoke a disembodied mental state

Even noteworthy performance attainments do not necessarily boost perceived self-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

People who regard themselves as highly efficacious act, think, and feel differently from those who perceive themselves as inefficacious. They produce their own future, rather than simply foretell it.