Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionV. Learning Theories 16. Bandura: Social
Cognitive Theory© The McGraw−Hill^493
Companies, 2009is not a thing but an active process of exploring, manipulating, and influencing the
environment in order to attain desired outcomes.
Core Features of Human Agency
Bandura (2001, 2004) discusses four core features of human agency: intentionality,
forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness.
Intentionalityrefers to acts a person performs intentionally. An intention in-
cludes planning, but it also involves actions. “It is not simply an expectation or predic-
tion of future actions but a proactive commitment to bringing them about” (2001, p. 6).
Intentionality does not mean that all of a person’s plans will be brought to fruition.
People continually change their plans as they become aware of the consequences of
their actions.
People also possess forethoughtto set goals, to anticipate likely outcomes of
their actions, and to select behaviors that will produce desired outcomes and avoid
undesirable ones. Forethought enables people to break free from the constraints of
their environment. If behavior were completely a function of the environment, then
behavior would be more variable and less consistent because we would constantly be
reacting to the great diversity of environmental stimuli. “If actions were determined
solely by external rewards and punishments, people would behave like weather-
vanes” (Bandura, 1986, p. 335). But people do not behave like weathervanes, “con-
stantly shifting direction to conform to whatever influence happened to impinge
upon them at the moment” (Bandura, 2001, p. 7).
People do more than plan and contemplate future behaviors. They are also ca-
pable of self-reactivenessin the process of motivating and regulating their own ac-
tions. People not only make choices but they monitor their progress toward fulfilling
those choices. Bandura (2001) recognizes that setting goals is not sufficient to at-
taining desired consequences. Goals must be specific, be within a person’s ability to
achieve, and reflect potential accomplishments that are not too far in the future. (We
discuss self-regulation more fully in the section titled Self-Regulation.)
Finally, people have self-reflectiveness.They are examiners of their own func-
tioning; they can think about and evaluate their motivations, values, and the mean-
ings of their life goals, and they can think about the adequacy of their own thinking.
They can also evaluate the effect that other people’s actions have on them. People’s
most crucial self-reflective mechanism is self-efficacy:that is, their beliefs that they
are capable of performing actions that will produce a desired effect.
Self-Efficacy
How people act in a particular situation depends on the reciprocity of behavioral, en-
vironmental, and cognitive conditions, especially those cognitive factors that relate
to their beliefs that they can or cannot execute the behavior necessary to produce de-
sired outcomes in any particular situation. Bandura (1997) calls these expectations
self-efficacy.According to Bandura (1994), “people’s beliefs in their personal effi-
cacy influence what courses of action they choose to pursue, how much effort they
will invest in activities, how long they will persevere in the face of obstacles and
failure experiences, and their resiliency following setbacks” (p. 65). Although
Chapter 16 Bandura: Social Cognitive Theory 487