Humans are producers of their life circumstance not just products of them.

People's conceptions about themselves and the nature of things are developed and verified through four different processes: direct experience of the effects produced by their actions, vicarious experience of the effects produced by somebody else's actions, judgments voiced by others, and derivation of further knowledge from what they already know by using rules of inference

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

How children learn to use diverse sources of efficacy information in developing a stable and accurate sense of personal efficacy is a matter of considerable interest

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

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.

People who hold a low view of themselves [will credit] their achievements to external factors, rather than to their own capabilities.