In any given instance, behavior can be predicted best by considering both self-efficacy and outcome beliefs . . . different patterns of self-efficacy and outcome beliefs are likely to produce different psychological effects

Many people who gain recognition and fame shape their lives by overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles, only to be catapulted into new social realities over which they have less control and manage badly. Indeed, the annals of the famous and infamous are strewn with individuals who were both architects and victims of their life courses.

When experience contradicts firmly held judgments of self-efficacy, people may not change their beliefs about themselves if the conditions of performance are such as to lead them to discount the import of the experience

Measures of self-precept must be tailored to the domain of psychological functioning being explored.

A theory that denies that thoughts can regulate actions does not lend itself readily to the explanation of complex human behavior.

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.

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