Self-Efficacy
What is Self-Efficacy?
Self-efficacy refers to an individual’s belief in their ability to successfully perform specific tasks and achieve goals. This psychological concept, developed by Albert Bandura, plays a critical role in how people approach challenges and tasks, influencing their motivation, persistence, and resilience. It impacts various aspects of life, including education, work performance, and health outcomes.
The Basic Idea
Imagine that one of your goals for the year is to run a marathon. Running 26.2 miles (42 km) is quite the challenge, and you’re feeling hesitant. You start to think of reasons why you can’t do it: you’re out of shape, you’re too busy to commit to months of training, and you’ve never done anything like this before.
What if you focused on the reasons why you can do it instead? You just watched your friend complete one last year, and he started off in a similar position to you, so what’s stopping you? You’re goal-oriented, you can be disciplined when you have your mind set on something, and with the right plan, you can get into shape. You start to believe in yourself and your ability to tackle the challenge, motivating you to sign up, buy good shoes, and find a training plan that works with your schedule. Three months later, you’re at the start line, confident that you’ll complete the race—and guess what? You do!
Self-efficacy, a person’s belief in their ability to achieve a goal, is an essential part of success. If you didn’t believe in yourself, it would be easy to hit snooze on your alarm when you were supposed to get up and go for a run, because what’s the point anyway? Believing in yourself positively impacts your motivation and behavior and makes you more likely to actually accomplish the goal. Albert Bandura, the social cognitive psychologist who defined self-efficacy, proposed four ways to achieve it:
- Performance accomplishments: Mastering one task strengthens our belief that we can complete other goals.
- Vicarious experience: Witnessing other people successfully complete a task makes us more likely to believe we can complete similar tasks.
- Verbal persuasion: When other people encourage us and tell us that we’re capable of taking on the challenge, we’re likely to start believing it.
- Physiological states: Our mood and emotional state can impact self-efficacy. If we’re experiencing high levels of stress or are feeling down, it’s hard to believe that we can succeed at reaching our goals.1
Self-efficacy plays an important role in how we approach tasks, challenges, and goals, whether big or small, and can allow us to be more successful in school, work, and even relationships!2
In order to succeed, people need a sense of self-efficacy, to struggle together with resilience to meet inevitable obstacles and inequities of life.
— Alberta Bandura, Canadian-American social cognitive psychologist3
About the Author
Emilie Rose Jones
Emilie currently works in Marketing & Communications for a non-profit organization based in Toronto, Ontario. She completed her Masters of English Literature at UBC in 2021, where she focused on Indigenous and Canadian Literature. Emilie has a passion for writing and behavioural psychology and is always looking for opportunities to make knowledge more accessible.
