For many activities, people cannot rely solely on themselves in evaluating their ability level because such judgments require inferences from probabilistic indicants of talent about which they may have limited knowledge. Self-appraisals are, therefore, partly based on the opinions of others who presumably possess evaluative competence

[Attributional] factors serve as conveyors of efficacy information that influence performance largely through their intervening effects on self-percepts of efficacy

There are countless studies on the negative spillover of job pressures on family life, but few on how job satisfaction enhances the quality of family life.

Because of such conjointedness, behavior that exerts no effect whatsoever on outcomes is developed and consistently performed

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.

If self-efficacy is lacking, people tend to behave ineffectually, even though they know what to do.

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.