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

One cannot afford to be a realist.

Self-efficacy is the belief in one's capabilities to organize and execute the sources of action required to manage prospective situations.

Incongruities between self-efficacy and action may stem from misperceptions of task demands, as well as from faulty self-knowledge

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

The difficulty in judging what type of behavior works well arises not only because a given course of action does not always produce the outcomes. Similar outcomes can occur for reasons other than the person's actions, which further complicates inferential judgment. Effects that arise independently of one's actions distort the influence of similar effects produced by the actions, but only on some occasions. Given a strong cognitive set to perceive regularities, even chance joint occurrences of events can be easily misjudged as genuine relationships of low contingent probability

It is widely assumed that beliefs in personal determination of outcomes create a sense of efficacy and power, whereas beliefs that outcomes occur regardless of what one does result in apathy