Post #1. Happy 2013!

"If you are reluctant to do something, force yourself to do it. It will be less difficult next time....."

Welcome to my new blog! This is a place where I will write about my passion - human behaviour. It is not blog where I give advice, but more of a place to hone my writing skills and write about areas of psychology that I personally find fascinating. I would love to hear your thoughts too so please join in the discussion in the comments section below...

2013 is officially underway and at this time of year there is much said about resolutions. My personal resolution, or I like to refer to them more as goals, is to develop this blog. So tick to that. My next goal is to actually write and post daily, mmmmm not sure how I'll go with that but here goes....

One thing that did spring to mind when I thought about goals is self-efficacy, a well-researched and prominent part of psychology, particularly within the school of personality psychology.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of Psychology (2009) self-efficacy is defined as "the ability to achieve desired results" and is a concept that became popular during the 1980's and 90's thanks to Bandura's cognitive social-learning theory.

Bandura defined self-efficacy as the 'belief that one can perform adequately in a particular situation" and demonstrated that  "your sense of self-efficacy influences your perceptions, motivation and performance in many ways" (1).

Essentially, high perceived self-efficacy means you take chances and you expect to be effective at what you do - and if the going gets tough, self-efficacy is the belief you have what it takes and makes you persist until the task is complete. So all-in-all, it appears high levels of perceived self-efficacy will more than likely contribute to keeping new year's resolutions on the straight and narrow.

So how does self-efficacy come about and how do you maintain it?

Bandura suggests that beyond actual accomplishments, there are three ways individuals make self-efficacy judgements:
- vicariously ie by watching other people perform
- by persuasion ie other people may convince you of your ability or you may convince yourself
- by tuning into your emotional responses ie anxiety may suggest low levels of self-efficacy  and excitement may suggest an expectation of success. (2)

Self-efficacy judgements based on these three areas influence how much effort you put into something and your resilience when faced with overcoming obstacles standing between you and your goals. In addition, Bandura also acknowledged that environment impacts on judgements - if you perceive your environment as supportive your expectation of success will be greater as will your perseverance.

So, what do the experts say?

Rresearch suggests that Bandura was 'on the money' so to speak, with self-efficacy being shown to increase both motivation and performance. Evidently increasing efficacy expectations is a useful approach (3).

And how do you do it?

Bandura himself had a simple method to increasing efficacy - a method that was later adopted by an advertising firm. "Just do it". If you are reluctant to do something (ie you are struggling with low self-efficacy), force yourself to do it. It will be less daunting and hard next time! (4).

So here's to a long, well-written, and successful blog. Maybe!!

Nina.

References:

 (1) and (2): Gerrig, Zimbardo, Campbell, Cumming and Wilkes (2009). Psychology and Life. Pearson Education Australia.

(3) and (4): Funder, D.C. The Personality Puzzle, 5th Ed (2010). W.W. Norton and Company.