Last month's biggest news in the world of psychology was the death of Dr. Albert Bandura at age 95. Dr. Bandura's obituary noted that a 2002 survey rated him the fourth-most influential psychologist of the 20th century, after Freud (who was actually a psychiatrist), B.F. Skinner, and developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. Over the course of a 57-year research career, Bandura published 17 books and hundreds of articles, received 19 honorary degrees, and was awarded both the Order of Canada and the U.S. National Medal of Science. His work has resonated through the fields of psychotherapy, education, and public health. By the end of his life, Bandura was so famous that many people wrongly assumed he must be dead already! In response to one student's email asking "are you still alive?" Bandura answered "no, this message is coming to you from the other side."
Even if you don't recognize Bandura's name, you know who he is: He invented the concept of "self-efficacy," which is a person's perception of how well they will be able to cope with a situation based on their skills and the circumstances confronting them. You have perhaps heard of Bandura's "Bobo Doll" studies, which showed that when children saw an adult hit an inflatable doll, they were more likely to hit the doll themselves. This research was widely cited in discussions about the effects of television violence on children, which led to stricter FTC regulations about what could and could not take place in children's programs. Bandura's later work utilized the modeling power of mass media in more positive ways, with interventions designed to help people develop positive behaviors related to diet, exercise, breastfeeding, and HIV prevention. I heard Dr. Bandura speak at an APA convention in 2016, as part of a panel about how psychology could address the greatest challenges of the next 100 years. He spoke about the importance of modeling pro-social behaviors to address major societal problems like overpopulation, environmental conservation, and gender equality. And indeed our recent pandemic experience has shown the importance of what our leaders model for us in shaping our response to environmental threats, just as Bandura's theory would have predicted.
Self-efficacy is a key component of Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory, which was a reaction to Skinner's behaviorism and was the first theory to put the "cognitive" component in the cognitive-behavioral approaches that are widespread today. Some of the unique aspects of Bandura's approach were (a) the idea that people could learn things vicariously (e.g., through instruction, or by watching others) rather than only by practicing new behaviors, (b) the idea that people could learn through modeling without reinforcement, which Skinner said was needed to establish a new behavior, and (c) most importantly, the idea that a person's belief about their own ability (i.e., self-efficacy) was a good predictor of their actual behavior. This third idea was Bandura's most revolutionary proposal, which led to his fame and his greatest accomplishments. The concept of self-efficacy was so influential that it eventually came to stand on its own, and was incorporated as a variable into other researchers' theories of behavior like the Health Belief Model, Protection Motivation Theory, and the Theory of Planned Behavior (where it goes by the name "perceived control"). And yet the idea of self-efficacy has also been the most heavily challenged and controversial element of Bandura's theory over the years.
No one doubts the assertion that self-efficacy predicts behavior: In the words of Henry Ford, "whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right." The main critique of self-efficacy is that it isn't clear how people come to believe in their own ability. In school settings, many people have expressed concern about the practice of giving "participation trophies" or giving students credit for effort. It's a good practice from the perspective of developing self-efficacy, because students who are rewarded for trying will be more likely to try again in the future, and may internalize the feeling of success in the form of self-efficacy beliefs. But educators are concerned about grade inflation, which has given some students the expectation that they will receive a good grade with little effort and that they are entitled to complain if they don't. From a classical perspective in which the ultimate purpose of education is to develop good character, rewarding effort undermines students' motivation to truly excel. People may come to have an inflated sense of their own abilities, which may in turn prevent them from learning what they really need to succeed in life (as in this study of people with inflated views of their own ability to swim). This critique, then, is essentially about the correct way to help people develop self-efficacy; to his credit, Bandura always advocated for modeling and practice, and never argued for building confidence through excessive rewards. Nevertheless, this is a way in which his theory has been commonly (mis)applied.
Another critique of self-efficacy is that it's an unnecessary concept. The simplest explanation of people's self-efficacy is that they look at their own past performance and extrapolate that into the future. It's no surprise that past behavior predicts future behavior. The strict behaviorist argument against self-efficacy, then, is that you could get the same results by just studying people's past behavior and not bother measuring self-efficacy because it just tells you the same thing. But some research has shown additive effects of these two variables, with self-efficacy incorporating an evaluation of past performance that adds something over and above past behavior alone. That's consistent with Two Minds Theory, in which the Narrative system layers some interpretation on top of our past behaviors and their consequences, which in turn affects future iterations of behavior in similar circumstances. Over time Bandura seems to have won this argument with the behaviorists, with empirical demonstrations of the role that cognition can play in predicting future behavior above and beyond one's past behavior.
Finally, critics of self-efficacy have argued that other variables like motivation and intention might be more important predictors of future behavior than just one's belief that they can do it. I have been on this side of the argument myself, arguing that motivation (which is an Intuitive-level experience) is more important than self-efficacy (which Bandura explicitly says is a type of belief, and therefore comes out of the Narrative mind). Others including the developers of the Theory of Planned Behavior relegate self-efficacy to a more distant role, in which is predicts intentions which in turn predict actual behaviors. Perhaps related to this difficulty, "self-efficacy" has been operationalized by investigators in very different ways, ranging from "general self-efficacy" (a belief that I can cope with life challenges that come up) to "specific self-efficacy" (beliefs about my concrete ability to perform specific behaviors, like exercising or healthy eating). In a study of glaucoma treatment adherence, my colleagues and I found that the more specific form of self-efficacy was a better predictor of behavior than generalized self-efficacy, which is a common finding among people who have included both types of measures in their research. Bandura wouldn't necessarily have disagreed with this measurement nuance, but it does suggest that self-efficacy is more situation-specific than some people think.
After more than 5 decades of research, Bandura's concept of self-efficacy has earned itself a lasting place in our understanding of psychology. But we clearly do need to be careful in how we apply it. Staying close to Bandura's original studies, people seem to develop self-efficacy through Intuitive-level practices like seeing other people perform a behavior, imagining what other people would do, or practicing a new behavior over time. Once a pattern of behavior is established, the Narrative mind can layer on interpretations that help to maintain it and generalize to new situations. Self-efficacy, then, is not only a type of belief, and it isn't helpful to target behavior change only by changing people's beliefs. The experiential truth of the belief is what makes it powerful in predicting our future behaviors -- as much an Intuitive experience as a Narrative story we tell ourselves.
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