139-411: Confidence is the feeling of belief or trust that a person or thing is reliable. Self-confidence is trust in oneself. Self-confidence involves a positive belief that one can generally accomplish what one wishes to do in the future. Self-confidence is not the same as self-esteem , which is an evaluation of one's worth. Self-confidence is related to self-efficacy —belief in one's ability to accomplish
278-512: A belief in an ideal may involve the belief that this ideal is something good, but it additionally involves a positive evaluative attitude toward this ideal that goes beyond a mere propositional attitude. Applied to the belief in God, opponents of the reductive approach may hold that a belief that God exists may be a necessary pre-condition for belief in God, but that it is not sufficient. The difference between de dicto and de re beliefs or
417-710: A belief in marriage could be translated as a belief that marriage is good. Belief-in is used in a similar sense when expressing self-confidence or faith in one's self or one's abilities. Defenders of a reductive account of belief-in have used this line of thought to argue that belief in God can be analyzed in a similar way: e.g. that it amounts to a belief that God exists with his characteristic attributes, like omniscience and omnipotence . Opponents of this account often concede that belief-in may entail various forms of belief-that, but that there are additional aspects to belief-in that are not reducible to belief-that. For example,
556-663: A de re sense, Lois does believe that Clark Kent is strong, while in a de dicto sense she does not. The contexts corresponding to de dicto ascriptions are known as referentially opaque contexts while de re ascriptions are referentially transparent. A collective belief is referred to when people speak of what "we" believe when this is not simply elliptical for what "we all" believe. Sociologist Émile Durkheim wrote of collective beliefs and proposed that they, like all " social facts ", "inhered in" social groups as opposed to individual persons. Jonathan Dancy states that "Durkheim's discussion of collective belief, though suggestive,
695-400: A dispositive belief ( doxa ) from knowledge ( episteme ) when the opinion is regarded correct (n.b., orthé not alethia ), in terms of right, and juristically so (according to the premises of the dialogue), which was the task of the rhetors to prove. Plato dismisses this possibility of an affirmative relation between opinion and knowledge even when the one who opines grounds his belief on
834-414: A proposition is true or a state of affairs is the case. A subjective attitude is a mental state of having some stance , take, or opinion about something. In epistemology , philosophers use the term "belief" to refer to attitudes about the world which can be either true or false . To believe something is to take it to be true; for instance, to believe that snow is white is comparable to accepting
973-471: A "belief in one's ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task". Various factors within and beyond an individual's control may affect their self-confidence. An individual's self-confidence can vary in different environments, such as at home or at school, and concerning different types of relationships and situations. When people attribute their success to a matter under their control, they are less likely to be confident about being successful in
1112-789: A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1980. He received the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions from the American Psychological Association in 1980 for pioneering the research in the field of self-regulated learning . In 1999 he received the Thorndike Award for Distinguished Contributions of Psychology to Education from the American Psychological Association, and in 2001, he received
1251-523: A belief in a proposition or one does not. This conception is sufficient to understand many belief ascriptions found in everyday language: for example, Pedro's belief that the Earth is bigger than the Moon. But some cases involving comparisons between beliefs are not easily captured through full beliefs alone: for example, that Pedro's belief that the Earth is bigger than the Moon is more certain than his belief that
1390-412: A belief system, and that tenanted belief systems are difficult for the tenants to completely revise or reject. He suggests that beliefs have to be considered holistically , and that no belief exists in isolation in the mind of the believer. Each belief always implicates and relates to other beliefs. Glover provides the example of a patient with an illness who returns to a doctor, but the doctor says that
1529-541: A better job candidate than both men and women who behaved modestly. Male common stock investors trade 45% more than their female counterparts, which they attribute to greater recklessness (though also self-confidence) of men, reducing men's net returns by 2.65 percentage points per year versus women's 1.72 percentage points. Women report lower self-confidence levels than men in supervising subordinates. One study found that women who viewed commercials with women in traditional gender roles appeared less self-confident in giving
SECTION 10
#17327728546921668-447: A central role in many religious traditions in which belief in God is one of the central virtues of their followers. The difference between belief-in and belief-that is sometimes blurry since various expressions using the term "belief in" seem to be translatable into corresponding expressions using the term "belief that" instead. For example, a belief in fairies may be said to be a belief that fairies exist. In this sense, belief-in
1807-461: A certain way is called a belief. This is not just true for humans but may include animals, hypothetical aliens or even computers. From this perspective, it would make sense to ascribe the belief that a traffic light is red to a self-driving car behaving just like a human driver. Dispositionalism is sometimes seen as a specific form of functionalism. It defines beliefs only concerning their role as causes of behavior or as dispositions to behave in
1946-446: A certain way. For example, a belief that there is a pie in the pantry is associated with the disposition to affirm this when asked and to go to the pantry when hungry. While it is uncontroversial that beliefs shape our behavior, the thesis that beliefs can be defined exclusively through their role in producing behavior has been contested. The problem arises because the mechanisms shaping our behavior seem to be too complex to single out
2085-444: A chess computer will behave. The entity has the belief in question if this belief can be used to predict its behavior. Having a belief is relative to an interpretation since there may be different equally good ways of ascribing beliefs to predict behavior. So there may be another interpretation that predicts the move of the queen to f7 that does not involve the belief that this move will win the game. Another version of interpretationism
2224-483: A close relationship and further refine the theory and practice. His research with Walters led to his first book, Adolescent Aggression, in 1959, followed by Social Learning and Personality Development in 1963, and in 1973, Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis . During a period dominated by behaviorism in the mold of B.F. Skinner , Bandura believed the sole behavioral modifiers of reward and punishment in classical and operant conditioning were inadequate as
2363-597: A competitive environment. A person can possess self-confidence in their ability to complete a specific task (self-efficacy)—e.g. cook a good meal or write a good novel—even though they may lack general self-confidence, or conversely be self-confident though they lack the self-efficacy to achieve a particular task. These two types of self-confidence are, however, correlated with each other, and for this reason, can be easily conflated. Social psychologists have found self-confidence to be correlated with other psychological variables including saving money, influencing others, and being
2502-418: A competitive tournament scheme, while risk and feedback aversion played a negligible role. Some scholars partly attribute the fact of women being less likely to persist in engineering college than men to women's diminished sense of self-confidence. More self-confident women may receive high-performance evaluations but not be as well-liked as men who engage in the same behaviour. Confident women may be considered
2641-466: A controversial experiment known as the Bobo doll experiment , designed to show that similar behaviors were learned by individuals shaping their own behavior after the actions of models. The Bobo doll experiment emphasized how young individuals are influenced by the acts of adults. When the adults were praised for their aggressive behavior, the children were more likely to keep on hitting the doll. However, when
2780-409: A few closely related beliefs while holists hold that they may obtain between any two beliefs, however unrelated they seem. For example, assume that Mei and Benjamin both affirm that Jupiter is a planet. The most straightforward explanation, given by the atomists, would be that they have the same belief, i.e. that they hold the same content to be true. But now assume that Mei also believes that Pluto
2919-831: A framework, and that many human behaviors were learned from other humans. Bandura began to analyze the means of treating unduly aggressive children by identifying sources of violence in their lives. Initial research in the area had begun in the 1940s under Neal Miller and John Dollard ; his continued work in this line eventually culminated in the Bobo doll experiment , which led to his 1977 treatise, Social Learning Theory . Many of his innovations came from his focus on empirical investigation and reproducible investigation, contrary to Sigmund Freud's popular theories of psychoanalysis . In 1974, Stanford University awarded him an endowed chair and he became David Starr Jordan Professor of Social Science in Psychology. In 1961, Bandura conducted
SECTION 20
#17327728546923058-402: A higher desire for success did better in performance than groups with a weaker desire. The more frequently a group succeeded, the more interest they had in the activity and success. The utility of self-confidence may vary by culture. Some find Asians perform better when they lack confidence, especially when compared to North Americans. Belief A belief is a subjective attitude that
3197-587: A lack of self-confidence during the recovery period. This is commonly referred to as DSF or defectum sui fiducia from the Latin for lack of self-confidence. This can be the case after a stroke , when the patient refrains from using a weaker lower limb due to fear of it not being strong enough. On the overconfidence effect , Martin Hilbert argues that confidence bias can be explained by a noisy conversion of objective evidence into subjective estimates, where noise
3336-452: A language-like structure, sometimes referred to as "mentalese". Just like regular language, this involves simple elements that are combined in various ways according to syntactic rules to form more complex elements that act as bearers of meaning. On this conception, holding a belief would involve storing such a complex element in one's mind. Different beliefs are separated from each other in that they correspond to different elements stored in
3475-402: A mental attitude towards the proposition "It will be sunny today" which affirms that this proposition is true. This is different from Sofía's desire that it will be sunny today, despite the fact that both Rahul and Sofía have attitudes toward the same proposition. The mind-to-world direction of fit of beliefs is sometimes expressed by saying that beliefs aim at truth. This aim is also reflected in
3614-404: A more realistic sense: that entities really have the beliefs ascribed to them and that these beliefs participate in the causal network. But, for this to be possible, it may be necessary to define interpretationism as a methodology and not as an ontological outlook on beliefs. Biologist Lewis Wolpert discusses the importance of causal beliefs and associates the making and use of tools with
3753-661: A particular culture. People with syncretic views blend the views of a variety of different religions or traditional beliefs into a unique fusion which suits their particular experiences and contexts ( eclecticism ). Unitarian Universalism exemplifies a syncretic faith. Typical reasons for adherence to religion include the following: Psychologist James Alcock also summarizes a number of apparent benefits which reinforce religious belief. These include prayer appearing to account for successful resolution of problems, "a bulwark against existential anxiety and fear of annihilation," an increased sense of control, companionship with one's deity,
3892-458: A person's perceived confidence indicates capability. If people do not believe that they are capable of coping, they experience disruption which lowers their confidence about their performance. Salespeople who are high in self-confidence tend to set higher goals for themselves, which makes them more likely to stay employed, yield higher revenues, and generate higher customer service satisfaction. In certain fields of medical practice, patients experience
4031-1086: A phenomenon known as stereotype threat , African American students perform more poorly on exams (relative to White American students) if they must reveal their racial identities before the exam. A similar phenomenon has been found in female students' performance (relative to male students) on math tests. The opposite has been observed in Asian Americans, whose confidence becomes tied up in expectations that they will succeed by both parents and teachers and who claim others perceive them as excelling academically more than they are. Male university students may be more confident than their female counterparts. In regards to inter-ethnic interaction and language learning, those who engage more with people of different ethnicity and language become more self-confident in interacting with them. Women who are either high or low in general self-confidence are more likely to be persuaded to change their opinion than women with medium self-confidence. However, when specific high confidence (self-efficacy)
4170-522: A plethora of widely cited academic research about confidence and related concepts like self-esteem and self-efficacy emerged. One of the earliest measures of self-confidence used a 12-point scale , ranging from a minimum score characterizing someone who is "timid and self-distrustful, shy, never makes decisions, self-effacing" to a maximum score characterizing someone who is "able to make decisions, absolutely confident and sure of his own decisions and opinions". Some researchers have measured self-confidence as
4309-479: A practical way in which to theorize about mental processes, in opposition to the mentalistic constructs of psychoanalysis and personality psychology . Upon graduation, he completed his postdoctoral internship at the Wichita Guidance Center. The following year, 1953, he accepted a teaching position at Stanford University , which he held until becoming professor emeritus in 2010. In 1974, he
Confidence - Misplaced Pages Continue
4448-526: A responsible student. Self-confidence affects interest, enthusiasm, and self-regulation. Self-confidence is important for accomplishing goals and improving performance. Marketing researchers have found that the general self-confidence of a person is negatively correlated with their level of anxiety. Self-confidence increases a person's general well-being and one's motivation which often increases performance. It also increases one's ability to deal with stress and mental health. The more self-confident an individual is,
4587-429: A sentence and in a map through its internal geometrical relations. Functionalism contrasts with representationalism in that it defines beliefs not in terms of the internal constitution of the mind but in terms of the function or the causal role played by them. This view is often combined with the idea that the same belief can be realized in various ways and that it does not matter how it is realized as long as it plays
4726-814: A simple construct divided into affective and cognitive components: anxiety as an affective aspect and self-evaluations of proficiency as a cognitive component. Other researchers have used body language proxies, rather than self-reports, to measure self-confidence by having examiners measure on a scale of 1 to 5 the subject's body language such as eye contact , fidgeting , posture , facial expressions , and gestures . Some methods measure self-esteem and self-confidence in various aspects or activities, such as speaking in public spaces, academic performance, physical appearance, romantic relationships, social interactions, and athletic ability. In sports, researchers have measured athletes' confidence about winning upcoming matches and how sensitive respondents' self-confidence
4865-402: A source of self-significance, and group identity. Typical reasons for rejection of religion include: Mainstream psychology and related disciplines have traditionally treated belief as if it were the simplest form of mental representation and therefore one of the building blocks of conscious thought. Philosophers have tended to be more abstract in their analysis, and much of the work examining
5004-823: A specific element of proselytization . This is a strongly-held belief in the Christian tradition which follows the doctrine of the Great Commission , and is less emphasized by the Islamic faith where the Quranic edict "There shall be no compulsion in religion" (2:256) is often quoted as a justification for toleration of alternative beliefs. The Jewish tradition does not actively seek out converts. Exclusivism correlates with conservative, fundamentalist, and orthodox approaches of many religions, while pluralistic and syncretist approaches either explicitly downplay or reject
5143-478: A specific task or goal. Confidence can be a self-fulfilling prophecy , as those without it may fail because they lack it, and those with it may succeed because they have it rather than because of an innate ability or skill. Ideas about the causes and effects of self-confidence have appeared in English-language publications describing characteristics of a sacrilegious attitude toward God, the character of
5282-541: A speech than those who viewed commercials with women taking on more masculine roles. Such self-confidence may also be related to body image , as one study found a sample of overweight people in Australia and the US are less self-confident about their body's performance than people of average weight, and the difference is even greater for women than for men. Others found that if a newborn is separated from its mother upon delivery,
5421-528: A student or teacher's confidence to participate in certain actions that will help them achieve distinct goals. Bandura died at his home in Stanford on July 26, 2021, from congestive heart failure , at the age of 95. Bandura received more than sixteen honorary degrees , including those from the University of British Columbia , the University of Ottawa , Alfred University , the University of Rome ,
5560-566: A style of psychology that sought to investigate psychological phenomena through repeatable, experimental testing. His inclusion of such mental phenomena as imagery and representation , and his concept of reciprocal determinism , which postulated a relationship of mutual influence between an agent and its environment, marked a radical departure from the dominant behaviorism of the time. Bandura's expanded array of conceptual tools allowed for more potent modeling of such phenomena as observational learning and self-regulation, and provided psychologists with
5699-442: A sudden negative change in one's circumstances, especially a loss of a job, could lead to decreased self-confidence, but more commonly if the jobless person believes the fault of his unemployment is his. They also noted how if individuals do not have a job long enough, they become apathetic and lose all self-confidence. In 1943, American psychologist Abraham Maslow argued in his paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" that an individual
Confidence - Misplaced Pages Continue
5838-399: A twin Earth in another part of the universe that is exactly like ours, except that their water has a different chemical composition despite behaving just like ours. According to Putnam, the reader's thought that water is wet is about our water while the reader's twin's thought on twin Earth that water is wet is about their water . This is the case despite the fact that the two readers have
5977-607: Is H 2 O part of the content of that belief)?", "How fine-grained or coarse-grained are our beliefs?", and "Must it be possible for a belief to be expressible in language, or are there non-linguistic beliefs?" Various conceptions of the essential features of beliefs have been proposed, but there is no consensus as to which is the right one. Representationalism is the traditionally dominant position. Its most popular version maintains that attitudes toward representations, which are typically associated with propositions, are mental attitudes that constitute beliefs. These attitudes are part of
6116-422: Is a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices; the service or worship of God or the supernatural. Religious belief is distinct from religious practice and from religious behaviours —with some believers not practicing religion and some practitioners not believing religion. Belief is no less of a theoretical term than is religion . Religious beliefs often relate to
6255-707: Is a planet, which is denied by Benjamin. This indicates that they have different concepts of planet , which would mean that they were affirming different contents when they both agreed that Jupiter is a planet. This reasoning leads to molecularism or holism because the content of the Jupiter-belief depends on the Pluto-belief in this example. An important motivation for this position comes from W. V. Quine 's confirmational holism , which holds that, because of this interconnectedness, we cannot confirm or disconfirm individual hypotheses, that confirmation happens on
6394-493: Is called the Lockean thesis . It states that partial beliefs are basic and that full beliefs are to be conceived as partial beliefs above a certain threshold: for example, every belief above 0.9 is a full belief. Defenders of a primitive notion of full belief, on the other hand, have tried to explain partial beliefs as full beliefs about probabilities. On this view, having a partial belief of degree 0.9 that it will rain tomorrow
6533-522: Is commonly observed in healthy populations. In the extreme, large differences between one's self-perception and one's actual behaviour are a hallmark of several disorders that have important implications for understanding treatment-seeking and compliance. Overconfidence supports delusional thinking, such as frequently occurs in individuals with schizophrenia . Whether a person, in making a decision, seeks out additional sources of information depends on their level of self-confidence specific to that area. As
6672-595: Is concerned with delineating the boundary between justified belief and opinion , and involved generally with a theoretical philosophical study of knowledge . The primary problem in epistemology is to understand what is needed to have knowledge. In a notion derived from Plato 's dialogue Theaetetus , where the epistemology of Socrates most clearly departs from that of the sophists , who appear to have defined knowledge as " justified true belief ". The tendency to base knowledge ( episteme ) on common opinion ( doxa ) Socrates dismisses, results from failing to distinguish
6811-496: Is defined as the mixing of memories during the observing and remembering process. Dominic D. P. Johnson and James H. Fowler write that "overconfidence maximizes individual fitness and populations tend to become overconfident, as long as benefits from contested resources are sufficiently large compared with the cost of competition". In studies of implicit self-esteem , researchers have found that people may consciously overreport their levels of self-esteem. Inaccurate self-evaluation
6950-845: Is due to Donald Davidson , who uses the thought experiment of radical interpretation , in which the goal is to make sense of the behavior and language of another person from scratch without any knowledge of this person's language. This process involves ascribing beliefs and desires to the speaker. The speaker really has these beliefs if this project can be successful in principle. Interpretationism can be combined with eliminativism and instrumentalism about beliefs. Eliminativists hold that, strictly speaking, there are no beliefs. Instrumentalists agree with eliminativists but add that belief-ascriptions are useful nonetheless. This usefulness can be explained in terms of interpretationism: belief-ascriptions help us in predicting how entities will behave. It has been argued that interpretationism can also be understood in
7089-477: Is high, generalized confidence plays less of a role. Men who have low generalized self-confidence are more easily persuaded than men of high generalized self-confidence. Women tend to respond less to negative feedback and be more averse to negative feedback than men. In experiments conducted by economists Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund , the researchers found that male overconfidence and male preference for competition contributed to higher male participation in
SECTION 50
#17327728546927228-474: Is internal to that person and are determined entirely by things going on inside this person's head. Externalism, on the other hand, holds that the relations to one's environment also have a role to play in this. The disagreement between atomism, molecularism and holism concerns the question of how the content of one belief depends on the contents of other beliefs held by the same subject. Atomists deny such dependence relations, molecularists restrict them to only
7367-487: Is negative feedback, this may interact with a negative affective state (low self-confidence) causing the individual to become demoralized, which in turn induces a self-defeating attitude that increases the likelihood of failure in the future more than if they did not lack self-confidence. People may be more self-confident about what they believe if they consult sources of information that agree with their world views. People may deceive themselves about their positive qualities and
7506-436: Is no phenomenon in the natural world which corresponds to our folk psychological concept of belief ( Paul Churchland ) and formal epistemologists who aim to replace our bivalent notion of belief ("either we have a belief or we don't have a belief") with the more permissive, probabilistic notion of credence ("there is an entire spectrum of degrees of belief, not a simple dichotomy between belief and non-belief"). Beliefs are
7645-527: Is often used when the entity is not real, or its existence is in doubt. Typical examples would include: "he believes in witches and ghosts" or "many children believe in Santa Claus " or "I believe in a deity". Not all usages of belief-in concern the existence of something: some are commendatory in that they express a positive attitude towards their object. It has been suggested that these cases can also be accounted for in terms of belief-that. For example,
7784-461: Is one of the most influential factors in how well an athlete performs in a competition. In particular, "robust self-confidence beliefs" are correlated with aspects of mental toughness —the ability to cope better than one's opponents and remain focused under pressure. These traits enable athletes to "bounce back from adversity". When athletes confront stress while playing sports, their self-confidence decreases. However, feedback from their team members in
7923-476: Is only correlated with years of supervisory experience and self-perceptions of power. Social scientists have discovered that self-confidence operates differently in different categories of people. In children, self-confidence emerges differently than in adults. For example, only children as a group may be more self-confident than other children. If children are self-confident, they may be more likely to sacrifice immediate recreational time for possible rewards in
8062-437: Is only motivated to acquire self-confidence (one component of "esteem") after achieving what they need for physiological survival, safety, and love and belonging. He claimed that satisfaction with self-esteem led to feelings of self-confidence that, once attained, led to a desire for " self-actualization ". As material standards of most people rapidly rose in developed countries after World War II and fulfilled their material needs,
8201-412: Is relatively obscure". Margaret Gilbert has offered a related account in terms of the joint commitment of a number of persons as a body to accept a certain belief. According to this account, individuals who together collectively believe something need not personally believe it individually. Gilbert's work on the topic has stimulated a developing literature among philosophers. One question that has arisen
8340-454: Is the same as having a full belief that the probability of rain tomorrow is 90%. Another approach circumvents the notion of probability altogether and replaces degrees of belief with degrees of disposition to revise one's full belief. From this perspective, both a belief of degree 0.6 and a belief of degree 0.9 may be seen as full beliefs. The difference between them is that the former belief can readily be changed upon receiving new evidence while
8479-428: Is their relation to perceptions and to actions: perceptions usually cause beliefs and beliefs cause actions. For example, seeing that a traffic light has switched to red is usually associated with a belief that the light is red, which in turn causes the driver to bring the car to a halt. Functionalists use such characteristics to define beliefs: whatever is caused by perceptions in a certain way and also causes behavior in
SECTION 60
#17327728546928618-423: Is to performance and negative feedback. Abraham Maslow and others have emphasized the need to distinguish between self-confidence as a generalized personality characteristic and self-confidence concerning a specific task, ability, or challenge (i.e., self-efficacy). The term "self-confidence" typically refers to a general personality trait— in contrast, "self-efficacy" is defined by psychologist Albert Bandura as
8757-400: Is true, one must not only believe the relevant true proposition but also have justification for doing so. In more formal terms, an agent S {\displaystyle S} knows that a proposition P {\displaystyle P} is true if and only if : That theory of knowledge suffered a significant setback with the discovery of Gettier problems , situations in which
8896-502: Is what this attitude is directed at: its object. Propositional attitudes are directed at propositions. Beliefs are usually distinguished from other propositional attitudes, like desires, by their mode or the way in which they are directed at propositions. The mode of beliefs has a mind-to-world direction of fit : beliefs try to represent the world as it is; they do not, unlike desires, involve an intention to change it. For example, if Rahul believes that it will be sunny today, then he has
9035-456: Is whether and how philosophical accounts of belief in general need to be sensitive to the possibility of collective belief. Collective belief can play a role in social control and serve as a touchstone for identifying and purging heresies , deviancy or political deviationism . As mental representations , beliefs have contents, which is what the belief is about or what it represents. Within philosophy, there are various disputes about how
9174-574: Is white"). There are various ways that contemporary philosophers have tried to describe beliefs, including as representations of ways that the world could be ( Jerry Fodor ), as dispositions to act as if certain things are true ( Roderick Chisholm ), as interpretive schemes for making sense of someone's actions ( Daniel Dennett and Donald Davidson ), or as mental states that fill a particular function ( Hilary Putnam ). Some have also attempted to offer significant revisions to our notion of belief, including eliminativists about belief who argue that there
9313-647: The Catholic Church each consider themselves to be the true heir to Early Christian belief and practice. The antonym of "orthodox" is " heterodox ", and those adhering to orthodoxy often accuse the heterodox of apostasy , schism , or heresy . The Renaissance and later the Enlightenment in Europe exhibited varying degrees of religious tolerance and intolerance towards new and old religious ideas. The philosophes took particular exception to many of
9452-518: The Grand Canyon is in Arizona involves entertaining the representation associated with this belief—for example, by actively thinking about it. But the great majority of our beliefs are not active most of the time: they are merely dispositional. They usually become activated or occurrent when needed or relevant in some way and then fall back into their dispositional state afterwards. For example,
9591-655: The Roman Catholic Church ) still hold to exclusivist dogma while participating in inter-religious organizations. Explicitly inclusivist religions include many that are associated with the New Age movement, as well as modern reinterpretations of Hinduism and Buddhism . The Baháʼí Faith considers it doctrine that there is truth in all faith-systems. Pluralism and syncretism are two closely related concepts. People with pluralist beliefs make no distinction between faith systems, viewing each one as valid within
9730-581: The University of Lethbridge , the University of Salamanca in Spain, Indiana University , the University of New Brunswick , Penn State University , Leiden University , Freie Universität Berlin , the Graduate Center of the City University of New York , Universitat Jaume I in Spain, the University of Athens , the University of Alberta , and the University of Catania . He was elected
9869-452: The founders or leaders , and considers it a matter of faith that the "correct" religion has a monopoly on truth. All three major Abrahamic monotheistic religions have passages in their holy scriptures that attest to the primacy of the scriptural testimony, and indeed monotheism itself is often vouched as an innovation characterized specifically by its explicit rejection of earlier polytheistic faiths. Some exclusivist faiths incorporate
10008-522: The "justified true belief" definition. Justified true belief is a definition of knowledge that gained approval during the Enlightenment , "justified" standing in contrast to "revealed". There have been attempts to trace it back to Plato and his dialogues, more specifically in the Theaetetus , and the Meno . The concept of justified true belief states that in order to know that a given proposition
10147-446: The "physical stance" and the "design stance". These stances are contrasted with the intentional stance , which is applied to entities with a more complex behavior by ascribing beliefs and desires to these entities. For example, we can predict that a chess player will move her queen to f7 if we ascribe to her the desire to win the game and the belief that this move will achieve that. The same procedure can also be applied to predicting how
10286-524: The British empire, and the culture of colonial-era American society. In 1890, the philosopher William James in his Principles of Psychology wrote, "Believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled... Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment". With World War I , psychologists praised self-confidence as greatly decreasing nervous tension, allaying fear, and ridding
10425-441: The Earth is bigger than Venus. Such cases are most naturally analyzed in terms of partial beliefs involving degrees of belief, so-called credences . The higher the degree of a belief, the more certain the believer is that the believed proposition is true. This is usually formalized by numbers between 0 and 1: a degree of 1 represents an absolutely certain belief, a belief of 0 corresponds to an absolutely certain disbelief and all
10564-1076: The Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy. He was the recipient of the Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology Award from the American Psychological Association and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Western Psychological Association , the James McKeen Cattell Award from the American Psychological Society , and the Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contribution to Psychological Science from
10703-414: The above conditions were seemingly met but where many philosophers deny that anything is known. Robert Nozick suggested a clarification of "justification" which he believed eliminates the problem: the justification has to be such that were the justification false, the knowledge would be false. Bernecker and Dretske (2000) argue that "no epistemologist since Gettier has seriously and successfully defended
10842-766: The accuracy of their claims. When people are uncertain and unknowledgeable about a topic, they are more likely to believe the testimony, and follow the advice of those that seem self-confident. However, expert psychological testimony on the factors that influence eyewitness memory appears to reduce juror reliance on self-confidence. People prefer leaders with greater self-confidence over those with less self-confidence. Self-confident leaders tend to influence others through persuasion instead of resorting to coercive means. They are more likely to resolve issues by referring them to another qualified person or calling upon bureaucratic procedures, which avoid personal involvement. Others suggest that self-confidence does not affect leadership style but
10981-403: The adults were punished, they consequently stopped hitting the doll as well. Bandura's results from this experiment were widely credited with helping shift the focus in academic psychology from pure behaviorism to cognitive psychology . By the mid-1980s, Bandura's research had taken a more holistic bent, and his analysis tended towards giving a more comprehensive overview of human cognition in
11120-720: The alternative conceptions. Representationalism characterizes beliefs in terms of mental representations . Representations are usually defined as objects with semantic properties —like having content, referring to something, or being true or false. Beliefs form a special class of mental representations since they do not involve sensory qualities in order to represent something, unlike perceptions or episodic memories. Because of this, it seems natural to construe beliefs as attitudes towards propositions, which also constitute non-sensory representations, i.e. as propositional attitudes . As mental attitudes , beliefs are characterized by both their content and their mode. The content of an attitude
11259-417: The antecedent inducements greatly influence the time and response of behavior. The stimulus that occurs before the behavioral response must be appropriate in relation to social context and performers. Second, response feedback influences also serve an important function. Following a response, the reinforcements, by experience or observation, will greatly impact the occurrence of the behavior in the future. Third,
11398-495: The battlefield of terror; they argued that soldiers who cultivated a strong and healthy body would also acquire greater self-confidence while fighting. At the height of the temperance movement of the 1920s, psychologists associated self-confidence in men with remaining at home and taking care of the family when they were not working. During the Great Depression , academics Philip Eisenberg and Paul Lazarsfeld wrote that
11537-430: The behavior they tend to cause. Interpretationism constitutes another conception, which has gained popularity in contemporary philosophy. It holds that the beliefs of an entity are in some sense dependent on or relative to someone's interpretation of this entity. Representationalism tends to be associated with mind-body-dualism. Naturalist considerations against this dualism are among the motivations for choosing one of
11676-417: The belief that 57 is greater than 14 was probably dispositional to the reader before reading this sentence, has become occurrent while reading it and may soon become dispositional again as the mind focuses elsewhere. The distinction between occurrent and dispositional beliefs is sometimes identified with the distinction between conscious and unconscious beliefs. But it has been argued that, despite overlapping,
11815-421: The beliefs of an entity are in some sense dependent on, or relative to, someone's interpretation of this entity. Daniel Dennett is an important defender of such a position. He holds that we ascribe beliefs to entities in order to predict how they will behave. Entities with simple behavioral patterns can be described using physical laws or in terms of their function. Dennett refers to these forms of explanation as
11954-420: The causal role characteristic to it. As an analogy, a hard drive is defined in a functionalist manner: it performs the function of storing and retrieving digital data. This function can be realized in many different ways: being made of plastic or steel, or using magnetism or laser. Functionalists hold that something similar is true for beliefs (or mental states in general). Among the roles relevant to beliefs
12093-711: The complexity of a decision increases, a person is more likely to be influenced by another person and seek out additional information. Several psychologists suggest that self-confident people are more willing to examine evidence that both supports and contradicts their attitudes. Meanwhile, people who are less self-confident and more defensive may prefer attitudinal information over information that challenges their perspectives. When individuals with low self-confidence receive feedback from others, they are averse to receiving information about their relative ability and negative informative feedback, and not averse to receiving positive feedback. If new information about an individual's performance
12232-513: The connections between human behavior, environmental factors, and personal factors such as cognitive, affective, and biological events, and of reciprocal determinism , governing the causal relations between such factors. Bandura's emphasis on the capacity of agents to self-organize and self-regulate would eventually give rise to his later work on self-efficacy . While investigating the processes by which modeling alleviates phobic disorders in snake-phobics, he found that self-efficacy beliefs (which
12371-411: The contents of beliefs are to be understood. Holists and molecularists hold that the content of one particular belief depends on or is determined by other beliefs belonging to the same subject, which is denied by atomists. The question of dependence or determination also plays a central role in the internalism-externalism- debate. Internalism states that the contents of someone's beliefs depend only on what
12510-544: The context of Early Christianity , the term "orthodoxy" relates to religious belief that closely follows the edicts, apologies , and hermeneutics of a prevailing religious authority. In the case of Early Christianity, this authority was the communion of bishops, and is often referred to by the term " Magisterium ". The term orthodox was applied almost as an epithet to a group of Jewish believers who held to pre-Enlightenment understanding of Judaism—now known as Orthodox Judaism . The Eastern Orthodox Church of Christianity and
12649-472: The context of social learning. The theory he expanded from social learning theory soon became known as social cognitive theory. The foundation of Albert Bandura's social learning theory is the idea that people may learn by seeing and copying the observable behaviors of others. As an alternative to the earlier work of colleague psychologist B.F. Skinner, who was well-known for advocating the behaviorist theory, psychologists Albert Bandura and Robert Sears presented
12788-410: The corresponding ascriptions concerns the contributions singular terms like names and other referential devices make to the semantic properties of the belief or its ascription. In regular contexts, the truth-value of a sentence does not change upon substitution of co-referring terms. For example, since the names "Superman" and "Clark Kent" refer to the same person, we can replace one with the other in
12927-416: The differing doctrines and practices espoused by other religions or by other religious denominations in a variety of ways. People with exclusivist beliefs typically explain other beliefs either as in error, or as corruptions or counterfeits of the true faith . This approach is a fairly consistent feature among smaller new religious movements that often rely on doctrine that claims a unique revelation by
13066-493: The exclusivist tendencies within a religion. People with inclusivist beliefs recognize some truth in all faith systems , highlighting agreements and minimizing differences. This attitude is sometimes associated with Interfaith dialogue or with the Christian Ecumenical movement, though in principle such attempts at pluralism are not necessarily inclusivist and many actors in such interactions (for example,
13205-528: The existence, characteristics and worship of a deity or deities, to the idea of divine intervention in the universe and in human life , or to the deontological explanations for the values and practices centered on the teachings of a spiritual leader or community . In contrast to other belief systems , religious beliefs are usually codified . A popular view holds that different religions each have identifiable and exclusive sets of beliefs or creeds , but surveys of religious belief have often found that
13344-437: The form of emotional and informational support reduces the extent to which stresses in sports reduce their self-confidence. At high levels of support, performance-related stress does not affect self-confidence. Among gymnasts, those who tend to talk to themselves in an instructional format tend to be more self-confident than those who do not. In a group, members' desire for success and confidence can also be related. Groups that had
13483-409: The foundations of human learning and the willingness of children and adults to imitate behavior observed in others, in particular, aggression. Bandura found in his research that models were an important source for learning new behaviors and for achieving behavioral change in institutionalized settings. Social learning theory posits that there are three regulatory systems that control behavior. First,
13622-503: The future, enhancing their self-regulatory capability. Successful performance of children in music increases feelings of self-confidence, increasing motivation for study. By adolescence, youth who have little contact with friends tend to have low self-confidence. In adolescents, low self-confidence may be a predictor of loneliness. In general, students who perform well have increased confidence, which likely in turn encourages them to take greater responsibility to complete tasks. Teachers affect
13761-642: The future. If someone attributes their failure to a factor beyond their control, they are more likely to be confident about succeeding in the future. If a person believes they failed to achieve a goal because of a factor that was beyond their control, they are more likely to be more self-confident that they can achieve the goal in the future. One's self-confidence often increases as one satisfactorily completes particular activities. American social psychologist Leon Festinger found that self-confidence in an individual's ability may only rise or fall when that individual can compare themselves to others who are roughly similar, in
13900-495: The general contribution of one particular belief for any possible situation. For example, one may decide not to affirm that there is a pie in the pantry when asked because one wants to keep it secret. Or one might not eat the pie despite being hungry, because one also believes that it is poisoned. Due to this complexity, we are unable to define even a belief as simple as this one in terms of the behavioral dispositions for which it could be responsible. According to interpretationism,
14039-497: The importance of cognitive functions in social learning. For example, for aggressive behavior to occur some people become easily angered by the sight or thought of individuals with whom they have had hostile encounters, and this memory is acquired through the learning process. Social learning theory became one of the theoretical frameworks for Entertainment-Education , a method of creating socially beneficial entertainment pioneered by Miguel Sabido . Bandura and Sabido went on to forge
14178-424: The internal constitution of the mind holding the attitude. This view contrasts with functionalism , which defines beliefs not in terms of the internal constitution of the mind but in terms of the function or the causal role played by beliefs. According to dispositionalism , beliefs are identified with dispositions to behave in certain ways. This view can be seen as a form of functionalism, defining beliefs in terms of
14317-411: The latter is more stable. Traditionally, philosophers have mainly focused in their inquiries concerning belief on the notion of belief-that . Belief-that can be characterized as a propositional attitude to a claim which is either true or false. Belief-in , on the other hand, is more closely related to notions like trust or faith in that it refers usually to an attitude to persons. Belief-in plays
14456-410: The laws of probability. This includes both synchronic laws about what one should believe at any moment and diachronic laws about how one should revise one's beliefs upon receiving new evidence. The central question in the dispute between full and partial beliefs is whether these two types are really distinct types or whether one type can be explained in terms of the other. One answer to this question
14595-427: The less likely they are to conform to the judgments of others. Higher confidence is correlated with individuals setting higher goals. When people face feelings of discontent because they do not accomplish a certain goal, people who have higher self-confidence may become even more persistent in accomplishing their goals, whereas those with low self-confidence are more prone to giving up quickly. Albert Bandura argued that
14734-491: The level of the theory as a whole. Another motivation is due to considerations of the nature of learning: it is often not possible to understand one concept, like force in Newtonian physics , without understanding other concepts, like mass or kinetic energy . One problem for holism is that genuine disagreements seem to be impossible or very rare: disputants would usually talk past each other since they never share exactly
14873-472: The mind. A more holistic alternative to the "language of thought hypothesis" is the map-conception , which uses an analogy of maps to elucidate the nature of beliefs. According to this view, the belief system of a mind should be conceived of not as a set of many individual sentences but as a map encoding the information contained in these sentences. For example, the fact that Brussels is halfway between Paris and Amsterdam can be expressed both linguistically as
15012-556: The more fantastical claims of religions and directly challenged religious authority and the prevailing beliefs associated with the established churches. In response to the liberalizing political and social movements, some religious groups attempted to integrate Enlightenment ideals of rationality, equality, and individual liberty into their belief systems, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Reform Judaism and Liberal Christianity offer two examples of such religious associations. Adherents of particular religions deal with
15151-459: The mother is less self-confident in her ability to raise that child than one who was not separated from her child. Furthermore, women who initially had low self-confidence are likely to experience a larger drop of self-confidence after separation from their children than women with relatively higher self-confidence. Heterosexual men who exhibit greater self-confidence relative to other men more easily attract single and partnered women. Self-confidence
15290-433: The negative qualities of others so that they can display greater self-confidence than they might otherwise feel, thereby enabling them to advance socially and materially. People with high self-confidence are more likely to impress others, as others perceive them as more knowledgeable and more likely to make correct judgments. Despite this, a negative correlation is sometimes found between the level of their self-confidence and
15429-456: The numbers in between correspond to intermediate degrees of certainty. In the Bayesian approach , these degrees are interpreted as subjective probabilities : e.g. a belief of degree 0.9 that it will rain tomorrow means that the agent thinks that the probability of rain tomorrow is 90%. Bayesianism uses this relation between beliefs and probability to define the norms of rationality in terms of
15568-658: The official doctrine and descriptions of the beliefs offered by religious authorities do not always agree with the privately held beliefs of those who identify as members of a particular religion. For a broad classification of the kinds of religious belief, see below. First self-applied as a term to the conservative doctrine outlined by anti-modernist Protestants in the United States, "fundamentalism" in religious terms denotes strict adherence to an interpretation of scriptures that are generally associated with theologically conservative positions or traditional understandings of
15707-515: The origin of his interest in human psychopathology . It was in this experience in the Yukon, where he was exposed to a subculture of drinking and gambling, which helped broaden his perspective and scope of views on life. Bandura arrived in the US in 1949 and was naturalized in 1956. He married Virginia Varns (1921–2011) in 1952, and they raised two daughters, Carol and Mary. Bandura took psychology courses in college and became passionate about
15846-574: The origin of human beliefs. In the context of Ancient Greek thought , three related concepts were identified regarding the concept of belief: pistis , doxa , and dogma . Simplified, Pistis refers to " trust " and "confidence," doxa refers to " opinion " and "acceptance," and dogma refers to the positions of a philosopher or of a philosophical school such as Stoicism . Beliefs can be categorized into various types depending on their ontological status, their degree, their object or their semantic properties. Having an occurrent belief that
15985-533: The originator of social learning theory , social cognitive theory , and the theoretical construct of self-efficacy , and is also responsible for the influential 1961 Bobo doll experiment . This Bobo doll experiment demonstrated the concept of observational learning where children would watch an adult beat a doll and as a result do the same. A 2002 survey ranked Bandura as the fourth most frequently cited psychologist of all time, behind B. F. Skinner , Sigmund Freud , and Jean Piaget . During his lifetime, Bandura
16124-408: The phobic individuals had in their own capabilities to alleviate their phobia) mediated changes in behavior and in fear-arousal. He launched a major program of research examining the influential role of self-referent thought in psychological functioning. Although he continued to explore and write on theoretical problems relating to myriad topics, from the late 1970s he devoted much attention to exploring
16263-915: The prescribed medicine is not working. At that point, the patient has a great deal of flexibility in choosing what beliefs to keep or reject: the patient could believe that the doctor is incompetent, that the doctor's assistants made a mistake, that the patient's own body is unique in some unexpected way, that Western medicine is ineffective, or even that Western science is entirely unable to discover truths about ailments. This insight has relevance for inquisitors , missionaries , agitprop groups and thought-police . The British philosopher Stephen Law has described some belief systems (including belief in homeopathy , psychic powers , and alien abduction ) as "claptrap" and says that such belief-systems can "draw people in and hold them captive so they become willing slaves of claptrap ... if you get sucked in, it can be extremely difficult to think your way clear again". Religion
16402-495: The psychoanalytic theory. He directed his initial research to the role of social modeling in human motivation , thought, and action. In collaboration with Richard Walters, his first doctoral student, he engaged in studies of social learning and aggression . Their joint efforts illustrated the critical role of modeling in human behavior and led to a program of research into the determinants and mechanisms of observational learning . The initial phase of Bandura's research analyzed
16541-542: The right perceptions; for example, to believe that it is raining given a perception of rain. Without this perception, there is still a disposition to believe but no actual dispositional belief. On a dispositionalist conception of belief, there are no occurrent beliefs, since all beliefs are defined in terms of dispositions. An important dispute in formal epistemology concerns the question of whether beliefs should be conceptualized as full beliefs or as partial beliefs. Full beliefs are all-or-nothing attitudes: either one has
16680-639: The role of self-efficacy beliefs in human functioning. In 1986 he published Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory , a book in which he offered a social cognitive theory of human functioning that accords a central role to cognitive, vicarious, self-regulatory and self-reflective processes in human adaptation and change. This theory has its roots in an agentic perspective that views people as self-organizing, proactive, self-reflecting and self-regulating, not just as reactive organisms shaped by environmental forces or driven by inner impulses. His book, Self-efficacy: The exercise of control
16819-525: The rule and is able to add justification ( logos : reasonable and necessarily plausible assertions/evidence/guidance) to it. A belief can be based fully or partially on intuition . Plato has been credited for the justified true belief theory of knowledge, even though Plato in the Theaetetus elegantly dismisses it, and even posits this argument of Socrates as a cause for his death penalty. The epistemologists, Gettier and Goldman , have questioned
16958-424: The same molecular composition. So it seems necessary to include external factors in order to explain the difference. One problem with this position is that this difference in content does not bring any causal difference with it: the two readers act in exactly the same way. This casts doubt on the thesis that there is any genuine difference in need of explanation between the contents of the two beliefs. Epistemology
17097-507: The same web of beliefs needed to determine the content of the source of the disagreement. Internalism and externalism disagree about whether the contents of our beliefs are determined only by what's happening in our head or also by other factors. Internalists deny such a dependence on external factors. They hold that a person and a molecule-by-molecule copy would have exactly the same beliefs. Hilary Putnam objects to this position by way of his twin Earth thought experiment . He imagines
17236-521: The self-confidence of their students depending on how they treat them. Students who perform better receive more positive evaluation reports and have greater self-confidence. Characteristically low-achieving students report less confidence, while characteristically high-performing students report higher self-confidence. Extracurricular activities in school settings can boost confidence in students at earlier ages. These include participation in games or sports, visual and performing arts, and public speaking. In
17375-474: The sentence "Superman is strong" without changing its truth-value; this issue is more complicated in case of belief ascriptions. For example, Lois believes that Superman is strong but she does not believe that Clark Kent is strong. This difficulty arises due to the fact that she does not know that the two names refer to the same entity. Beliefs or belief ascriptions for which this substitution does not generally work are de dicto , otherwise, they are de re . In
17514-401: The social learning hypothesis. In 1986, Bandura published Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory , in which he re-conceptualized individuals as self-organizing, proactive, self-reflecting, and self-regulating, in opposition to the orthodox conception of humans as governed by external forces. He advanced concepts of triadic reciprocal causation , which determined
17653-400: The subject of various important philosophical debates. Notable examples include: "What is the rational way to revise one's beliefs when presented with various sorts of evidence?", "Is the content of our beliefs entirely determined by our mental states, or do the relevant facts have any bearing on our beliefs (e.g. if I believe that I'm holding a glass of water, is the non-mental fact that water
17792-679: The subject. Bandura graduated in three years, in 1949, with a B.A. from the University of British Columbia , winning the Bolocan Award in psychology, and then moved to the then-epicenter of psychology, the University of Iowa , from where he obtained his M.A. in 1951 and Ph.D in Clinical Psychology in 1952. Arthur Benton was his academic adviser at Iowa, giving Bandura a direct academic descent from William James , while Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence were influential collaborators. During his Iowa years, Bandura came to support
17931-404: The tendency to revise one's belief upon receiving new evidence that an existing belief is false. Upon hearing a forecast of bad weather, Rahul is likely to change his mental attitude but Sofía is not. There are different ways of conceiving how mental representations are realized in the mind. One form of this is the language of thought hypothesis , which claims that mental representations have
18070-407: The text and are distrustful of innovative readings, new revelation, or alternative interpretations. Religious fundamentalism has been identified in the media as being associated with fanatical or zealous political movements around the world that have used a strict adherence to a particular religious doctrine as a means to establish political identity and to enforce societal norms. First used in
18209-468: The traditional view." On the other hand, Paul Boghossian argues that the justified true belief account is the "standard, widely accepted" definition of knowledge. A belief system comprises a set of mutually supportive beliefs. The beliefs of any such system can be religious , philosophical , political , ideological , or a combination of these. The British philosopher Jonathan Glover , following Meadows (2008), says that beliefs are always part of
18348-434: The truth of the proposition "snow is white". However, holding a belief does not require active introspection . For example, few individuals carefully consider whether or not the sun will rise tomorrow, simply assuming that it will. Moreover, beliefs need not be occurrent (e.g. a person actively thinking "snow is white"), but can instead be dispositional (e.g. a person who if asked about the color of snow would assert "snow
18487-455: The two distinctions do not match. The reason for this is that beliefs can shape one's behaviour and be involved in one's reasoning even if the subject is not conscious of them. Such beliefs are cases of unconscious occurrent mental states. On this view, being occurrent corresponds to being active, either consciously or unconsciously. A dispositional belief is not the same as a disposition to believe. We have various dispositions to believe given
18626-498: The viability of the belief concept stems from philosophical analysis. The concept of belief presumes a subject (the believer) and an object of belief (the proposition). Like other propositional attitudes , belief implies the existence of mental states and intentionality , both of which are hotly debated topics in the philosophy of mind , whose foundations and relation to brain states are still controversial. Albert Bandura Albert Bandura (December 4, 1925 – July 26, 2021)
18765-409: Was a Canadian-American psychologist. He was a professor of social science in psychology at Stanford University . Bandura was responsible for contributions to the field of education and to several fields of psychology, including social cognitive theory , therapy , and personality psychology , and was also of influence in the transition between behaviorism and cognitive psychology . He is known as
18904-545: Was elected president of the American Psychological Association (APA), the world's largest association of psychologists. Bandura would later state the only reason he agreed to be in the running for the APA election was because he wanted his 15 minutes of fame without any intentions of being elected. He also worked as a sports coach. Bandura was initially influenced by Robert Sears' work on familial antecedents of social behavior and identificatory learning and gave up his research of
19043-522: Was of Polish and Ukrainian descent; his father was from Kraków, Poland, whilst his mother was from Ukraine. Bandura's parents were a key influence in encouraging him to seek ventures out of the small hamlet they resided in. The summer after finishing high school, Bandura worked in the Yukon to protect the Alaska Highway against sinking. Bandura later credited his work in the northern tundra as
19182-455: Was published in 1997. Bandura's social cognitive theories have been applied to education as well, mainly focusing on self-efficacy , self-regulation , observational learning , and reciprocal determinism . Bandura's research showed that high perceived self-efficacy led teachers and students to set higher goals, and it increased the likelihood that they would dedicate themselves to those goals. In an educational setting self-efficacy refers to
19321-540: Was widely described as the greatest living psychologist, and as one of the most influential psychologists of all time. Bandura was born in Mundare , Alberta, an open town of roughly four hundred inhabitants, as the youngest child, in a family of six. The limitations of education in a remote town such as this caused Bandura to become independent and self-motivated in terms of learning, and these primarily developed traits proved very helpful in his lengthy career. Bandura
#691308