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Two students sit the same mock test and get the same score. One opens the next chapter that evening. The other stops practising physics for a week. The difference is often not ability but belief: whether each one thinks they can do what the next problem asks. Albert Bandura gave that belief a name, self-efficacy, and showed where it comes from.
Who was Albert Bandura?
Bandura spent nearly 60 years at Stanford University and is considered one of the most influential psychological scientists in the world. According to the Association for Psychological Science obituary, he died on 26 July 2021 at age 95. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1980 and received the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama in 2016.
What did the Bobo doll experiment show?
In the 1961 study by Bandura, Ross and Ross, children watched an adult with an inflatable clown called Bobo. Some saw the adult kick, hit and throw the doll. Others saw an adult who played quietly. The children were then tested in a new room, without the adult present.
As the APS describes it, children who had watched the aggressive adult were likely to be aggressive too. They kicked the doll, hit it with a mallet, and even invented new ways to attack it. Children who saw a calm adult, or no adult, showed far less aggression.
The point for learning was larger than aggression. The children had not been rewarded or punished. They learned by watching. This challenged the view, common at the time, that rewards and punishments are needed for learning.
What is self-efficacy?
In Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change (1977), Bandura separated two kinds of expectation. An outcome expectation is your estimate that a given action will lead to a result: "If I solve 30 problems a day, my score will rise." An efficacy expectation is your conviction that you can carry out that action: "I can actually solve these problems." You can believe the first and still doubt the second, and then the first does not help much.
Bandura proposed that efficacy expectations decide whether someone starts, how much effort they spend and how long they keep going when things get hard. He named four sources:
Performance accomplishments: your own successes. He called these especially influential because they are based on personal mastery. Successes raise efficacy; repeated failures lower it, particularly early on.
Vicarious experience: seeing someone like you succeed.
Verbal persuasion: being told, credibly, that you can do it.
Physiological states: how you read your own body, such as a racing heart before a test.
A later review of school research by Usher and Pajares (2008) found that mastery experience is typically the most influential of the four, though the balance differs by context.
What can a student take from Bandura's way of working?
Bandura built theories that could be tested and used. Here is how to use this one on yourself.
Build mastery in steps. After a bad test, do not jump straight to the hardest problems. Pick a level where you get most right, then raise the difficulty gradually. Our guide to bouncing back after a bad test has a plan.
Watch someone similar. A topper's solution can feel out of reach. A classmate at your level explaining how they cracked a problem is closer to what Bandura meant by vicarious experience.
Make encouragement specific. "You're smart" is weak evidence. "You set up the free-body diagram correctly in all five problems" is something you can believe. Parents can read our post on praising effort rather than ability.
Reread your body's signals. Bandura listed physiological states as a source of efficacy. A fast heartbeat before an exam is arousal, not proof that you will fail.
Keep a success log. Write down each problem type you have solved on your own. On bad days, read it.
Starting at the right level is the hard part when you are not sure where your gaps are. Fermi's AI tutor works out what you already know and builds a plan for the session, so the first problems you meet are ones you can solve. For the view of learning Bandura moved beyond, see our post on B. F. Skinner and reinforcement.
This week, choose one topic you avoid, solve three easy problems from it, and write each one in your success log.
