Self-efficacy beliefs determine persistence and vulnerability to stress and depression

Evidence

Efficacy beliefs also shape people’s outcome expectations—whether they expect their efforts to produce favorable outcomes or adverse ones. In addition, efficacy beliefs determine how people view opportunities and impediments. People with low self-efficacy beliefs are easily convinced of the futility of their effort in the face of difficulties. They quickly give up trying. Those with high self-efficacy beliefs view impediments as surmountable by the improvement of self-regulatory skills and perseverant effort. They stay the course in the face of difficulties. People’s beliefs in their coping efficacy also play a pivotal role in the quality of their emotional life and their vulnerability to stress and depression. The final way in which self-efficacy beliefs shape people’s lives is through their choice of activities and environments at important decision points. By their choices people influence what they become and set the course their lives take. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 78

Efficacy beliefs also shape people’s outcome expectations—whether they expect their efforts to produce favorable outcomes or adverse ones. In addition, efficacy beliefs determine how people view opportunities and impediments. People with low self-efficacy beliefs are easily convinced of the futility of their effort in the face of difficulties. They quickly give up trying. Those with high self-efficacy beliefs view impediments as surmountable by the improvement of self-regulatory skills and perseverant effort. They stay the course in the face of difficulties. People’s beliefs in their coping efficacy also play a pivotal role in the quality of their emotional life and their vulnerability to stress and depression. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 78

Categorization

• DEFINE: Spells out the four distinct ways self-efficacy beliefs operate: outcome expectations, construal of impediments, emotional coping, and activity/environment choice.
• XREF: Low-efficacy resignation connects to passivity in the face of harmful policy — why people accept rather than resist. — connects to: Depression emerges when entrepreneurial self-belief meets blocked opportunity — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1605; Resource inadequacy, overload, and role ambiguity correlate with poor worker mental health — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 270
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 78