Freedom [should not be] conceived negatively as exemption from social influences or situational constraints. Rather...positively as the exercise of self-influence to bring about desired results.

People with high assurance in their capabilities approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided.

Persons who have a strong sense of efficacy deploy their attention and effort to the demands of the situation and are spurred by obstacles to greater effort.

Students judge how well they might do in a chemistry course from knowing how peers, who performed comparably to them in physics, fared in chemistry

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.

Regression analyses show that self-efficacy contributes to achievement behavior beyond the effects of cognitive skills

Most of the images of reality on which we base our actions are really based on vicarious experience.