50 Part 1 Basic Communication Processeswas a time when such recognition seemed far off as Dinklage
attempted to jump-start an acting career while living in a
rat-infested Brooklyn apartment without heat. It’s not that
he didn’t have offers for decent-paying parts; it’s that he
turned them down. Dinklage is a little person (diagnosed
with achondroplasia—a common cause of dwarfism) who
refused to play elves or leprechauns, roles that would forever
tie his talents to his stature. When he played Tom Thumb in
a vaudevillian play, he so impressed director Tom McCarthy
that McCarthy rewrote a script for “The Station Agent”
to make Dinklage the leading man. A series of roles later,
Dinklage earned the success he desired without playing parts
that he felt would demean him—all because he believed he
could “play the romantic lead and get the girl” (quoted in
Kois, 2012).
Dinklage’s experiences reveal the power of self-efficacy,
which is the third factor influencing our cognitions about ourselves. Like
Dinklage, you have an overall view of all aspects of yourself (self-concept), as
well as an evaluation of how you feel about yourself in a particular area at any
given moment in time (self-esteem). Based on this information, you approach a
communication situation with an eye toward the likelihood of presenting yourself
effectively. This ability to predict actual success from self-concept and self-esteem
is self-efficacy (Bandura, 1982). Your perceptions of self-efficacy guide your
ultimate choice of communication situations, making you much more likely to
engage in communication when you believe you will probably be successful and
avoid situations where you believe your self-efficacy to be low.
Even though a person’s lack of effort is most often caused by perceptions of
low self-efficacy, people with very high levels of self-efficacy sometimes become
overconfident (Bandura, 1982; Harris & Hahn, 2011). For example, some
students believe that if they understood their professors’ lectures well while sit-
ting in class, then they wouldn’t really need to study their notes very much after
that to prepare for exams. Those students often end up shocked later at how
much information they did not remember.
Self-efficacy affects your ability to cope with failure and stress. Feelings of
low self-efficacy may cause you to dwell on your shortcomings. If you already
feel inadequate and then fail at something, a snowball effect occurs as the fail-
ure takes a toll on your self-esteem; stress and negative feelings result, lower-
ing your feelings of self-efficacy even more. For example, Jessie is job hunting
but worries that she does not do well in interviews. Every time she goes to an
interview and then doesn’t get a job offer, her self-efficacy drops. She lowers
her expectations for herself, and her interview performance worsens as well. By
contrast, people with high self-efficacy are less emotionally battered by failures
because they usually chalk up disappointments to a “bad day” or some other
external factor.
Perceptions of your self-efficacy may lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy—a
prediction that causes you to change your behavior in a way that makes the pre-
diction more likely to occur. If you go to a party believing that others don’t enjoy
your company, for example, you’ll probably stand apart, not talking to anyoneWHAT CAN WE learn
about the power of self-
concept and self-esteem
in our own lives from Peter
Dinklage’s success? Helen Sloan
/© HBO/Courtesy Everett Collection
CONNECT
Self-fulfilling prophecies
are deeply tied to verbal
and nonverbal communi-
cation. If you believe you
will ace a job interview
because you are well pre-
pared, you will likely stand
tall and make confident
eye contact with your inter-
viewer (Chapter 3) and use
appropriate and effective
language (Chapter 4) to
describe your skill set. Your
confidence just may land
you the position you want!