Top 80 Albert Bandura Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Self-efficacy is the belief in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the sources of action required to manage prospective situations.”

— Albert Bandura

Featured in: Believe in Yourself Quotes, Psychology Quotes

2. “Self-belief does not necessarily ensure success, but self-disbelief assuredly spawns failure.”

— Albert Bandura

Featured in: Believe in Yourself Quotes

3. “Where everyone is responsible, no one is really responsible.”

— Albert Bandura

4. “People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities.”

— Albert Bandura

5. “Humans are producers of their life circumstance not just products of them.”

— Albert Bandura

6. “People who regard themselves as highly efficacious act, think, and feel differently from those who perceive themselves as inefficacious. They produce their own future, rather than simply foretell it.”

— Albert Bandura

7. “In social cognitive theory, perceived self-efficacy results from diverse sources of information conveyed vicariously and through social evaluation, as well as through direct experience.”

— Albert Bandura

8. “People with high assurance in their capabilities approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided.”

— Albert Bandura

9. “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.”

— Albert Bandura

10. “People who are insecure about themselves will avoid social comparisons that are potentially threatening to their self-esteem.”

— Albert Bandura

11. “People not only gain understanding through reflection, they evaluate and alter their own thinking.”

— Albert Bandura

12. “By sticking it out through tough times, people emerge from adversity with a stronger sense of efficacy.”

— Albert Bandura

13. “If self-efficacy is lacking, people tend to behave ineffectually, even though they know what to do.”

— Albert Bandura

14. “How children learn to use diverse sources of efficacy information in developing a stable and accurate sense of personal efficacy is a matter of considerable interest.”

— Albert Bandura

15. “Persons who have a strong sense of efficacy deploy their attention and effort to the demands of the situation and are spurred by obstacles to greater effort.”

— Albert Bandura

Featured in: Strong Quotes

16. “If there is any characteristic that is distinctly human, it is the capability for reflective self-consciousness.”

— Albert Bandura

17. “One cannot afford to be a realist.”

— Albert Bandura

18. “Most of the images of reality on which we base our actions are really based on vicarious experience.”

— Albert Bandura

19. “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.”

— Albert Bandura

20. “People judge their capabilities partly by comparing their performances with those of others.”

— Albert Bandura

21. “Among the types of thoughts that affect action, none is more central or pervasive than people’s judgments of their capabilities to deal effectively with different realities.”

— Albert Bandura

22. “Regression analyses show that self-efficacy contributes to achievement behavior beyond the effects of cognitive skills.”

— Albert Bandura

23. “In the self-appraisal of efficacy, there are many sources of information that must be processed and weighed through self-referent thought.”

— Albert Bandura

24. “Through their capacity to manipulate symbols and to engage in reflective thought, people can generate novel ideas and innovative actions that transcend their past experiences.”

— Albert Bandura

25. “The performances of others are often selected as standards for self-improvement of abilities.”

— Albert Bandura

26. “The content of most textbooks is perishable, but the tools of self-directedness serve one well over time.”

— Albert Bandura

27. “Even the self-assured will raise their perceived self-efficacy if models teach them better ways of doing things.”

— Albert Bandura

28. “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.”

— Albert Bandura

29. “As a general rule, moderate levels of arousal facilitate deployment of skills, whereas high arousal disrupts it. This is especially true of complex activities requiring intricate organization of behavior.”

— Albert Bandura

30. “The adequacy of performance attainments depends upon the personal standards against which they are judged.”

— Albert Bandura

31. “Once established, reputations do not easily change.”

— Albert Bandura

32. “Ironically, it is the talented who have high aspirations, which are possible but exceedingly difficult to realize, who are especially vulnerable to self-dissatisfaction despite notable achievements.”

— Albert Bandura

33. “Social cognitive theory rejects the dichotomous conception of self as agent and self as object. Acting on the environment and acting on oneself entail shifting the perspective of the same agent rather than reifying different selves regulating each other or transforming the self from agent to object.”

— Albert Bandura

34. “Gaining insight into one’s underlying motives, it seems, is more like a belief conversion than a self-discovery process.”

— Albert Bandura

35. “A theory that denies that thoughts can regulate actions does not lend itself readily to the explanation of complex human behavior.”

— Albert Bandura

36. “Self-doubt creates the impetus for learning but hinders adept use of previously established skills.”

— Albert Bandura

37. “Even noteworthy performance attainments do not necessarily boost perceived self-efficacy.”

— Albert Bandura

38. “Perceived self-inefficacy predicts avoidance of academic activities whereas anxiety does not.”

— Albert Bandura

39. “When people are not aiming for anything in particular or when they cannot monitor their performance, there is little basis for translating perceived efficacy into appropriate magnitudes of effort.”

— Albert Bandura

40. “It is widely assumed that beliefs in personal determination of outcomes create a sense of efficacy and power, whereas beliefs that outcomes occur regardless of what one does result in apathy.”

— Albert Bandura

41. “People regulate their level and distribution of effort in accordance with the effects they expect their actions to have. As a result, their behavior is better predicted from their beliefs than from the actual consequences of their actions.”

— Albert Bandura

42. “We are more heavily invested in the theories of failure than we are in the theories of success.”

— Albert Bandura

43. “Judgments of adequacy involve social comparison processes.”

— Albert Bandura

44. “Indeed there are many competent people who are plagued by a sense of inefficacy, and many less competent ones who remain unperturbed by impending threats because they are self-assured of their coping capabilities.”

— Albert Bandura

45. “Agemates provide the most informative points of reference for comparative efficacy appraisal and verification. Children are, therefore, especially sensitive to their relative standing among the peers with whom they affiliate in activities that determine prestige and popularity.”

— Albert Bandura

46. “Forceful actions arising from erroneous beliefs often create social effects that confirm the misbeliefs.”

— Albert Bandura

47. “Such self-referent misgivings creates stress and undermine effective use of the competencies people possess by diverting attention from how best to proceed to concern over personal failings and possible mishaps.”

— Albert Bandura

48. “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.”

— Albert Bandura

49. “Perceived self-efficacy and beliefs about the locus of outcome causality must be distinguished.”

— Albert Bandura

50. “Dualistic doctrines that regard mind and body as separate entities do not provide much enlightenment on the nature of the disembodied mental state or on how an immaterial mind and bodily events act on each other.”

— Albert Bandura