People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities.

Self-appraisals are influenced by evaluative reactions of others.

People infer high self-efficacy from successes achieved through minimal effort on difficult tasks, but they infer low self-efficacy if they had to work hard under favorable conditions to master relatively easy tasks

Among the types of thoughts that affect action, none is more central or pervasive than people's judgments of their capabilities to deal effectively with different realities

The satisfactions people derive from what they do are determined to a large degree by their self-evaluative standards

People who are burdened by acute misgivings about their coping capabilities suffer much distress and expend much effort in defensive action... they cannot get themselves to do things they find subjectively threatening even though they are objectively safe. They may even shun easily manageable activities because they see them as leading to more threatening events over which they will be unable to exercise adequate control.

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