Psychology cannot tell people how they ought to live their lives. It can however, provide them with the means for effecting personal and social change.

Convictions that outcomes are determined by one's own actions can be either demoralizing or heartening, depending on the level of self-judged efficacy. People who regard outcomes as personally determined, but who lack the requisite skills, would experience low self-efficacy and view the activities with a sense of futility

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

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.

Self-appraisals of efficacy are reasonably accurate, but they diverge from action because people do not know fully what they will have to do, lack information for regulating their effort, or are hindered by external factors from doing what they can

People judge their capabilities partly by comparing their performances with those of others

When experience contradicts firmly held judgments of self-efficacy, people may not change their beliefs about themselves if the conditions of performance are such as to lead them to discount the import of the experience