Success and failure are largely self-defined in terms of personal standards. The higher the self-standards, the more likely will given attainments be viewed as failures, regardless of what others might think.

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.

Accurate processing of information about outcomes is no simple task under the variable conditions of everyday life . . . usually, many factors enter into determining what effects, if any, given actions will have, Actions, therefore, produce outcomes probabilistically rather than certainly. Depending on the particular conjunction of factors, the same course of action may produce given outcomes regularly, occasionally, or only infrequently

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

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

People who are insecure about themselves will avoid social comparisons that are potentially threatening to their self-esteem

It is no more informative to speak of self-efficacy in global terms than to speak of nonspecific social behavior