Chapter 9
Read chapter 9. Summarize the chapter. What was the most surprising thing you learned? How do personal control beliefs serve to encourage (motivate) or discourage behavior? Provide an example of each (an encouraged and discouraged behavior) and specifically discuss how personal control beliefs would influence those behaviors.
Provide a list of terms at the end of your post that you used from the chapter.
The first main point chapter nine explains is efficacy. There are two types of expectations, 'efficacy expectations' and 'outcome expectations'. Efficacy expectations are a person's judgment of one's capacity to execute a particular act or course of action, and outcome expectations are a judgment that once an action is performed, that it will cause a particular outcome. Related to those ideas, and more directly applied to a particular individual, is 'self-efficacy', which is the capacity to use one's judgment of how well or poorly one will cope with a situation, given the skills one possesses and the circumstances one faces. Within that there are four main sources of self-efficacy: one's personal history in trying to execute a particular behavior, observations of similar others who also try to execute that particular behavior, verbal persuasion from others, and physiological states, such as fatigue, pain, or a racing heart rate. In my opinion the most important of those is personal history because it can serve as memories or cognitive reinforcement to people in case they do not have access to social support, in case they are feeling down physiologically, and in case they do not have the opportunity to view a peer perform the particular action.
Continuing on self-efficacy, self-efficacy beliefs affect: choice of activities and selection of environments, extent of effort and persistence put forth during performance, the quality of thinking and decision-making during performance, and emotional reactions, especially those related to stress and anxiety. I think the chapter made an interesting point related to this, that high self-efficacy beliefs can be acquired and changed. I think that is an important fact because I believe that every person needs high self-efficacy in at least a few parts of their lives in order to have any success.
Related to self-efficacy are the ideas of ‘empowerment’ and ‘mastery beliefs’. Empowerment is the concept of a person possessing the knowledge, skills, and beliefs that allow people to exert control over their lives. Mastery beliefs reflect the extent of perceived control one has over attaining desirable outcomes and preventing aversive ones. The next major point of the chapter is ‘Ways of Coping’, which include: Approach vs. Avoidance, Social vs. Solitary, Proactive vs. Reactive, Direct vs. Indirect, Control vs. Escape, Alloplastic vs. Autoplastic, and Problem Focused vs. Emotion Focused. All of the approaches have advantages and disadvantages for each person in various situations.
Another major topic the chapter explains is ‘Learned Helplessness’, or the psychological state that results when an individual expects that life’s outcomes are uncontrollable. Once learned helplessness occurs it leaves three reliable deficits: motivational, learning, and emotional. The chapter named a study which found that people with depression are not more prone to learned helplessness deficits, which I found to be the most surprising part of the chapter, and it was new information to me, so I was glad I caught that piece of information. Related to the Learned Helplessness Theory is the ‘Reactance Theory’, which states that people experience reactance only if they expect to have some control over what happens to them, and people react to a loss of control by becoming more active, even aggressive. Both of the theories focus on how people react to uncontrollable outcomes, but they suggest that people act in very different ways.
Personal control beliefs serve to motivate or discourage behavior by how willing a person is to try at performing a particular activity. They can also motivate or discourage behavior through learning, meaning that pessimistic people have an acquired set that interferes with their ability to learn new response-outcome contingencies. And they can motivate or discourage behavior in terms of emotions, such as in situations where someone should be active or assertive, but if they do not have high self-efficacy then they might be lethargic or depressive, and just simply not care what happens. An example might be with someone taking a test, if that person is motivated then they are more likely to study harder prior to the test, which would enhance their learning process. And if they have high self-efficacy then they are more likely to be optimistic and believe they are capable of doing well, as opposed to being pessimistic and therefore believing nothing they do will affect their performance.
Terms: 1) Efficacy expectations 2) Outcome expectations 3) Self-efficacy 4) Sources of self-efficacy 5) Self-efficacy beliefs affect 6) Empowerment 7) Mastery Beliefs 8) Ways of Coping 9) Learned Helplessness 10) Reactance Theory
The main focus of this chapter is the beliefs of personal control. Personal control is the power we have over ourselves to make our own decisions. Perceived control is the idea that someone “believes” they have the ability to choose their own path. A person’s perception is everything, if someone “believes” they have autonomy over their choices they are more likely to do well and be persistent. Self-efficacy is the first major section within chapter nine and it deals with our perception of how well we can perform a particular task. Self-efficacy comes from four different sources according to our book. The first is one’s personal history of attempting the behavior in question, second is our observation of other similar to us attempting the behavior in question, third is verbal persuasion of others (pep talks), and finally is our physiological states such as a racing heart or a calm heart. Separately or all together these sources of self-efficacy have a significant impact on our behaviors.
The most interesting thing from chapter nine is the idea of learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is the psychological state that results when an individual expects that life’s outcomes are uncontrollable. Helplessness is learned and it was proved in Seligman and Maier’s 1967 study with dogs. The researchers used controllable and uncontrollable electrical shock to retrieve their findings. Some dogs were shocked without warning and without a means to stop the shock, but another set of dogs were warned about the impending shock and were given a button that stopped the shock. As you could imagine the dogs with the button immediately stopped the shock everything, but the dogs that didn’t have the button were the ones that felt learned helplessness. Although I don’t condone their methods, they didn’t get the results they were seeking.
Personal beliefs control our behavior because they either provide us with the confidence to persist and succeed, or they break our will and prevent us from preforming to our full potential. Some examples of what I mean would include basketball and playing the guitar. Playing basketball is something that I do very well, and I have for a long time. With that said, my self-efficacy level in terms of playing basketball is fairly high. I know that I can play it pretty well from past experiences of playing basketball, I gain even more confidence from watching others that are near or below my skill level succeed, pep talks or verbal persuasion go hand in hand with sports and therefore help elevate my level of self-efficacy and finally there is my psychological state; when it comes to playing basketball and competing in sports in front of a crowd, I do not get overly nervous, therefore I remain calm and essentially have an edge over others that get tense and uptight. On the other end of the spectrum is learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is as it sounds; a learned behavior. Playing the guitar was something that I always wanted to be able to do, and do well, but it wasn’t in the cards for me. From a young age I attempted to play the guitar but couldn’t grasp the concept. It was also very detrimental to my self-esteem that I was surrounded by people that excelled at playing the guitar, thus making me feel very inferior and sad. Pep talks have very little to do with playing the guitar, therefore had little to no effect on my success or failure and lastly my psychological state did very little to help the situation, considering I was always very frustrated when playing the guitar. In the end, personal control beliefs have a very significant effect, whether it be positive or negative.
Terms: Personal Control, Perceived Control, Perception, Self-Efficacy and Learned Helplessness.
This chapter dealt with types of motivation that are related to personal control beliefs. A lot of the motivation to have personal control in like comes from the expectations that people have. There are two types of expectations that are discussed in the chapter: efficacy and outcome expectations. Efficacy expectations are forecasts about one’s capacity to competently enact a particular course of action. Outcome expectancies are forecasts that a particular outcome will be achieved once a given action is adequately executed. Both efficacy and outcome expectancies must be relatively high for people to exert personal control. Related to this is self-efficacy, which is an individual’s belief that they have what it takes to gather the resources needed to cope effectively with the potentially overwhelming demands of a situation. Self-efficacy arises from 4 particular areas; personal history of trying to execute a particular course of action, observations of similar others executing the same behavior, verbal persuasions from others, and physiological states such as an abnormally fast versus calm heartbeat. When someone has formed self-efficacy it is able to effect the choice of activities and selection of environments (approach vs. avoidance). It also effects extent of effort, persistence, resiliency, the quality of thinking and decision making, and emotional reactions, particularly stress and anxiety. Self-efficacy can also help a person’s personal empowerment by participating in a mastery modeling program.
Learned helplessness is the psychological state that results when an individual expects that events in his or her life are uncontrollable. If someone learns that their behavior exerts a stronger influence over their outcomes than do outside influences, they develop a mastery motivational orientation. If someone learns that their behavior exerts little or no influence over their outcomes while outside influences actually control what happens to them, they develop a helpless motivational orientation. Contingency, cognition, and behavior are three fundamental components that explain learned helplessness. Contingency is the objective relationship between a person’s behavior and the environment’s positive or negative outcomes. Cognition includes all the mental processes (expectancies, attributions, biases) an individual relies on to translate objective environmental contingencies in to subjective personal control beliefs. Behavior is the person’s voluntary coping behavior, and it varies along a continuum that extends from active and energetic to passive and withdrawing. One theory, reactance theory, explains how people react to uncontrollable life events.
I thought that one of the most interesting things from this chapter was the connection of helplessness and depression. They reported that a study found depressed individuals were more accurate in judging how much control they had over a situation. Non-depressed individuals believe that they have more control over a situation than they actually do and that depressed persons’ memories are more equally balanced for positive and negative events. Personal control beliefs such as an optimistic or pessimistic explanatory style can encourage or discourage behavior. A lot of personal control is dependent on the amount of perceived control or actual control one has.
An example of an encouraged behavior would be one that includes high self-efficacy. A personal example would be my ability to perform well in various forms of physical exercise or sports. I have had personal history with multiple types of sports and exercises, and this activity is very often modeled by others beforehand. Encouragement from others is important and this reduces the amount of stress after it is mastered. An example of a discouraged behavior is something that could have happened to me while I was learning to ride a motorcycle. If you develop a helpless motivational orientation and believe that learning a new skill is not in your control you won’t be successful. You can watch someone else ride a motorcycle and they can give you motivational pep talks but if you have a pessimistic explanatory style and don’t believe that you have the ability to actually ride the motorcycle you won’t succeed.
ME Terms: personal control beliefs, expectations, efficacy, outcome, self-efficacy, empowerment, learned helplessness, mastery motivational orientation, contingency, cognition, behavior, helpless motivational orientation, reactance theory, depression, pessimistic explanatory style, optimistic explanatory style
Chapter 9 discuses the topic of personal control beliefs and how the motivation to exercise personal control over what happens to you. The chapter starts off discussing two types of expectancies: efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. Efficacy expectations are judgments of a person’s capacity to carry out a particular action. Outcome expectations are judgments of whether or not a given action will end in a particular outcome. Efficacy expectations and outcome expectations need to be high before a person’s behavior becomes energetic and goal-directed.
The chapter then goes into discussing the difference between efficacy and self-efficacy. Self-efficacy defined as a person’s judgment of how well/poorly they will cope with a situation given the skills they possess and the circumstances they face. Beliefs of self-efficacy come from four areas: 1. personal behavior history; 2. observation of others who also try to execute the same behavior; 3. verbal persuasions/pep talks; and 4. physiological states (e.g. racing heart). The chapter then talks about the different ways self-efficacy effects behavior. Self-efficacy affects: 1. the choice of activities and selection of environments; 2. amount of effort and persistence exerted during performance; 3. the quality of thinking and decision making during performance; and 4. emotional reactions. The combination of sources of self-efficacy and effects of self-efficacy produce the overall extent of self-efficacy beliefs. The chapter then talks about the idea of empowerment. Empowerment involves having the knowledge, skills, and beliefs that allow people to have control over their lives. This section makes an important point that high self-efficacy beliefs can be acquired and changed and that the level of self0efficacy predicts ways of coping called personal empowerment or competent functioning.
The next major section in the chapter discusses mastery beliefs. The book defines mastery beliefs as referring to the extent of perceived control one has over reaching desirable outcomes and preventing aversive ones. Within this section, the chapter discusses different ways of coping: approach vs avoidance; social vs solitary; proactive vs reactive; direct vs indirect; control vs escape; alloplastic vs autoplastic; and emotion focused. The difference between mastery-oriented people and helpless-oriented people is also discussed. Mastery-oriented people respond to failure by remaining focused on the task at hand and by wanting to achieve mastery despite the difficulties they are experiencing. Helpless-oriented people respond to failure by giving up and acting as if the situation at hand is out of their control.
The next section talks about learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is the psychological state that results when an individual expects life’s outcomes are uncontrollable. I thought this section was rather interesting especially the study using dogs and electric shocks which showed learned helplessness in animals. Learned helplessness theory includes three components: contingency, cognition, and behavior. Contingency refers to the relationship between a person’s behavior and the environment’s outcome. Contingency is scored on a range from 0 (being uncontrollable outcomes) to 1 (controllable outcomes). Cognition, in this sense, refers to how controllable the person thinks those environmental outcomes are. Behavior, as it relates to learned helplessness, varies from very passive to very active depending on people’s coping behavior to achieve or to prevent outcomes. The chapter also discusses three major effects of learned helplessness: motivational deficits (e.g., decreased willingness to try), learning deficits (e.g., interferes with a person’s ability to learn new response-outcome possibilities), and emotional deficits. Helplessness may also be related to depression in that the depressed individual may expect bad events to occur and feel as if there is nothing they can do to prevent the bad events from happening. Along with explaining why bad things happen, the chapter talks about explanatory style. Explanatory style is a way people go about explaining the reasons why bad things happen to them. There are two types of explanatory styles: optimistic and pessimistic explanatory styles. Individuals with an optimistic explanatory style tend to explain bad events using terms that refer to things being unstable and controllable. Individuals with an pessimistic explanatory style tend to explain bad events with terms that refer to things being stable and uncontrollable.
The last sections in the chapter discusses the reactance theory which predicts that people experience reactance only if they expect to have some control over what happens to them. The second part discusses hope. Hope is experienced when people have both the motivation to work toward their goals and when they know ways to achieve those goals.
Personal control beliefs can motivate or discourage a person’s behavior depending on how willing that person is to try at a certain task. If people expect they can perform a task the more willing they are to put forth effort and persist at that task despite facing difficulties and setbacks. A personal example of an encouraged behavior is my ability and skill at playing a variety of sports, mainly volleyball. I have high self-efficacy in terms of how I perceive myself when playing volleyball. I love playing volleyball and I would try my hardest during every practice and every game because I knew that I could get better and better and achieve my goals in that area. For me to address my desire to play volleyball, I needed to be confident in my efficacy to perform those behaviors as well as be reasonably sure my performance will pay off—I was both confident and sure in my abilities and performance. My sources of self efficacy (personal history of playing volleyball, watching others play volleyball, pep talks from coaches, and challenging physiological states) and the corresponding effects on behavior (choice of playing volleyball, remaining persistence, making good decisions while playing volleyball, and remain interested and enthused by the activity) only furthered my efforts in accomplishing my goals in volleyball. A personal example of a discourage behavior is learning how to crochet. I always wanted to learn how to crochet, but I could never get how the whole process worked. For awhile, I kept trying and trying but eventually I got fed up with not getting the results I wanted so I stopped trying all together. I quit trying even after hearing my grandmother’s pep talks and watching her crochet. I learned a sense of helplessness and developed a pessimistic attitude towards the task; no matter what I did or tried I was never going to be able to crochet.
Terms Used: pessimistic; helplessness; learned helplessness; self efficacy; control beliefs; reactance theory; hope; optimistic and pessimistic explanatory styles; cognition; Contingency; Helpless-oriented; Mastery-oriented; coping; efficacy expectations; and outcome expectations
Chapter nine focuses individual’s feelings of control and perception about the control that they have over their environments. Two main types of expectations are discussed in the chapter; efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. Efficacy expectations describe a person’s perception of how well they will do at a particular task. This is different in need for competence in that efficacy expectations can change based on outside environmental factors, while need for competence is considered more stable. Outcome expectations are the perceptions of how likely a consequence will take place after the behavior. For example, I write a thesis because of the outcome expectation that it will result in a master’s degree. The chapter also goes on to describe the many things that cause self-efficacy as well as the consequences of having high levels.
One of the parts of the chapter that I thought was interesting was the discussion about how people’s ability to think critically and make decisions is altered based on their level of efficacy. I thought this was interesting because in a work-place setting if workers are experiencing low levels of efficacy it is likely that they will not perform as well. The chapter also made a note that perceived self-efficacy impacts the amount of stress and anxiety that the individual feels. My question then is how can we improve worker’s efficacy to make them more engaged and better performers? One thing the chapter suggests is that people need to feel they have control over their environment and feel empowered. I think that there are a couple ways this could be done in this particular setting. One would be giving workers more autonomy over their work. While having guidelines and deadlines are absolutely important, it may be beneficial to allow the worker to control some of the aspects of how the project is completed. This not only was indirectly suggested in the chapter but it is also shown in a lot of research in I/O psychology.
The most surprising thing for me was probably the discussion about how different people handle failure feedback. Some people thrive in the face of a challenge and to feedback that was not positive in regard to their performance, while others are more likely to simply give up completely. This makes it very difficult in a workplace to improve performance across the board. On one end, managers need to show procedural justice and give negative feedback the same way to everyone simply to be fair; however the chapter suggests that because people handle poor feedback differently, they should maybe receive it in different ways.
There are several causes of the level of perceived control a person feels and these lead to either action or avoidance (either encourage or discourage behavior). These can be personal history, modeling, verbal persuasion/encouragement, or physiological activity. Getting positive verbal encouragement is going to motivate someone to accomplish a task. On the other hand, constant negative feedback can discourage a certain behavior as well because people avoid behaviors that will draw negative consequences. For example, after many years of playing high school athletics it was brought to my attention that I run weird. Here I was running funny for 8 years of my life in front of an audience. This past experience (personal history) and negative feedback has discouraged me from ever doing this behavior in public. On the other hand, a behavior that gets me positive feedback and that I have experienced before and that offer something to me personally I am likely to repeat. For example, I love to give gifts during the Holidays because it is rewarding to see how happy the other person is. I’ve seen this throughout my life so my history not only encourages but it is personally rewarding as well. Overall, personal control beliefs have a very strong impact on how people behave and these beliefs are learned throughout the course of ones life. Whether that be in the form of a motivator or experiencing learned helplessness, our personal control beliefs drive us toward either approach or avoidance.
ME Terms: Efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, control, perception, personal control beliefs, need for competence, self-efficacy, decision-making, empowerment, stress/anxiety, failure feedback, approach/avoidance, personal history, vicarious experience/modeling, verbal persuasion, encouragement, physiological activity, learned helplessness.
Summarize the chapter.
Chapter 9 is about the motivation to exercise personal control over what happens to you. People will try to make things change for the better if they believe they have what it takes to do this and the environment will be responsive to their influences. The level that people try to exercise control are due to the strengths of their expectancies of being able to do so. Expectancy is a subjective prediction of how likely an event is to occur. Efficacy and outcome are the two types of expectations. Efficacy expectation is a judgment about whether the person can do the act. Outcome expectation is a judgment that an action will achieve a certain outcome. Efficacy and outcome expectations must be relatively high for people to exert strong coping efforts. Self-efficacy is an individual’s belief that they have the resources needed to cope effectively with an overwhelming situation. Self-efficacy comes from behavior history of trying to complete that task before, observing others that used that behavior, pep talks from others, and physiological states. Self efficacy affects the person’s choice of activities, selection of environments, extent of effort, persistence, resiliency, quality of thinking and decision making, and emotional reactions. Self-efficacy expectations provide the cognitive-motivational foundation for personal empowerment. Empowerment involves possessing the knowledge, skills, and beliefs that allow people to have control over their lives. People need self-efficacy beliefs so they can translate their knowledge into skills when threatened and have control over negative thoughts. Mastery modeling program is a formal self-efficacy training. Increases in self-efficacy help to eliminate anxiety, doubt, and avoidance. Learned helplessness happens when an individual expects that events are uncontrollable. When people learn that their behavior has a strong influence on their outcomes, they learn a mastery motivational orientation. When people learn that their behavior has little to no influence on their outcomes, they learn a helpless motivational orientation. Contingency, cognition, and behavior explain the effects of learned helplessness. Contingency is the objective relationship between a person’s behavior and the environment’s positive or negative outcomes. Cognitions are mental processes the individual relies on to translate objective environmental contingencies into subjective personal control beliefs. Behavior is the person’s voluntary coping behavior. It’s on a continuum from active and energetic to passive and withdrawing. Reactance theory also explains how people react to uncontrollable life events. Expectations of controllability support reactance, and expectations of uncontrollability support helplessness. People automatically show an initial reactance by becoming more assertive psychologically and behaviorally in situations that are difficult to control. If reactance fails to reestablish personal control, individuals then turn to helplessness. People experience hope when they have the motivation to work towards their goals and when people know ways to achieve their goals.
What was the most surprising thing you learned?
I was surprised that helplessness is learned. I would think helplessness is automatic and learning how to be independent is learned. I assumed this because as a baby we show helplessness in most everything, and we learn that other people can do everything for us. However, as I read this section it makes more sense why helplessness is learned.
How do personal control beliefs serve to encourage (motivate) or discourage behavior?
If we believe that we are capable of accomplishing something, it motivates us to do it. However, if we believe that we can’t do it, it discourages that behavior. They have to believe they have some control in the situation in order to be motivated to try a behavior.
Provide an example of each (an encouraged and discouraged behavior) and specifically discuss how personal control beliefs would influence those behaviors.
An encouraged behavior may be seen in taking a test. I am encouraged because I have done well on other tests in that class, other people have told me they did well on the same test, and I feel competent in regards to the material. I can also be encouraged by pep talks from others that I will do well.
A discouraged behavior may be an assignment from a teacher who is seen as grading unfairly. I feel like I have no control in this situation, because I will receive the same grade on my paper whether I spend an hour or five hours on it. Other people have said they always receive a poor grade and on my past papers I have gotten a bad grade. My peers also tell me that working harder on my paper will not make any difference, so I put it a minimal amount of effort.
Provide a list of terms at the end of your post that you used from the chapter.
Motivation, personal control, expectancy, efficacy expectation, outcome expectation, coping efforts, self-efficacy, personal empowerment, mastery modeling program, learned helplessness, mastery motivational orientation, helpless motivational orientation, contingency, cognition, behavior, reactance theory, expectations of controllability, expectations of uncontrollability, reactance, hope
Chapter 9 is about Personal control beliefs. The chapter's focus is "the motivation to exercise personal control over what happens to you". People can figure out how to exert control over some predictable aspects of the environment, otherwise known as personal control. There are two critera for people to be motivated to exercise personal control over their life's outcomes: (1)belief that they have what it takes to influence their environment (2) belief their environment is responsive to attempts to influence. An example of personal control beliefs encouraging behavior would be an individual in college taking classes with upperclassmen standing. An individual would have the belief that they have the power to take harder classes and get A's. They would believe they have the studying and comprehension skills to recieve desired grades in classes. For example they might try to predict what questions will be on a test and make sure to know the answers to those problems. In this example the individual might have a high self-efficacy: they have the ability to cope with difficult classes and succeed in those classes. A personal control belief that would discourage behavior is that an individual feels they are able to diet. An individual would feel discouraged to snack, eat sweets, eat out. This individual would want to influence their environment and show they have self control. Strength of personal control can depend on the individuals expectancy of being able to. Expectancy is prediction of likelihood of the occurence of an event.
There are two kinds of expectancy: efficacy expectaions, outcome expectations. The first, efficacy expectation is judgement of completing a task or action. The second, outcome expectation is judgement that a certain action will cause/have a particular outcome. Both expectancies are causal determinants of initiation and regulation of behavior. Individuals lacking either expecations can result in reluctance and avoidance.
In the study of percieved control researchers look at self, action, and control. There is a relationship between self and control.
Next the book discuss self-efficacy. It points out that self-efficacy and efficacy expectations are not the same. Self-efficacy is an individuals capacity use their personal resources, or skills to cope with certain demands or circumstances. Its not just ability or skills, but effective performance also referred to as competent functioning. The opposite of self efficacy would be self-doubt. When circumstances test our self efficacy its called self-efficacy analysis. In self-efficacy analysis there are task demands which are met by skills.
There are specific sources of self-efficacy beliefs these are: history in trying a specific behavior, observing similar others trying that specific behavior (vicarious experience), verbal persuasion, and physiological states.
Self-efficacy can have a positive effect on behavior, putting forth effort, persisting etc. Other effects are choice selection of activities/environment, amount of effort/persistance, quality decison making, and emotional reactions. There is a difference between self-efficacy and the psychological need for competence.
The level of self-efficacy can predict ways of coping also known as personal empowerment or competent functioning. An example is overcoming avoidance-based fear. Empowerment includes: knowledge, skills, and beliefs. To be empowered an individual needs self-efficacy beliefs. One program created to empower people was the Mastery Modeling Program.
Mastery beliefs are and individuals perceived control of attaining certain outcomes and preventing others. Mastery beliefs depends on an individuals way of coping. The book also spoke about mastery motivational orientation and helpless motivational orientation. These orientations are both concerned with an individuals reaction to failure. Helplessness is determined on how quickly, how emphatically an individual gives up. Learned helplessness is a psychological state of an individual in which they belief that they have no control over life outcomes.
Learned helplessness is not an innate state but something that is learned. Learned Helplessness theory has three components (1) contingency (2) cognition (3) behavior. Learned helpelessness can have significant effects such as deficits in learning, emotional, and motivational. Helplessness and depression have many similar symptoms. Learned helplessness can also be apart of an individuals personality for example a pessimistic explanatory style versus a optimistic explanatory style.
TERMS: personal control, expectancy, efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, initiation/regulation of behavior, percieved control, self agent, action means, control ends, self efficacy, competent functiong, self-doubt, self-efficacy analysis, task demands, skills, verbal persuasion, vicarious experience, persistance, effort, emotionality, psychological need for competence, personal empowerment, avoidance based fear, self efficacy beliefs, personal behavior history, mastery modeling program, mastery beliefs, coping, helplessness, mastery motivational orientation, helpless motivational orientation, learned helplessness, contingency, cognition, motivational deficit, learning deficit, emotional deficit, explanatory style: pessimistic/optimistic,
Chapter 9 discusses personal control beliefs and how they motivate us in our perceptions of control that we have in life. Our personal control beliefs directly influence whether we believe we have the skills to ensure that desired events occur in our lives and they also influence whether or not we believe we can prevent undesired events from occurring. We have two types of expectancies. Self efficacy expectations (which is our judgment of our capacity to do something) and outcome expectations (which is whether the action we take will produce the result that we wanted). Both efficacy and outcome expectations have to be high in order for our motivation to take action becomes goal directed and energetic.
Self-efficacy or the belief that we have what it takes varies in each individuals and is based on four major components (1) our personal histories, both successes and failures, in trying to execute the behavior (2) vicarious experience of observing others execute the behavior which can either increase or decrease our self-efficacy (3) verbal persuasion by others such as coaches or teachers which can give us a temporary efficacy boost to generate some motivation, possibly at least for another attempt and (4) our physiological state (i.e., fatigue, fast heart rate, mental confusion, shaking).
Supporters of empowering individuals believe that self-efficacy beliefs can be changed and acquired. Empowerment teaches knowledge and skills so that people feel they have more control over their lives. For example, women who escape domestic abuse situations often go through some type of empowerment course based on the mastery modeling program which can teach coping skills and avoidance skills so that these women feel empowered to not return to an abusive situation.
Learned helplessness can occur when individuals do not feel they have control over events in their lives. People who experience learned helplessness must be taught that people have stronger influences over their environment than the environment has over them. Three components that help explain learned helplessness are (1) contingency which is the relationship between the individual’s behaviors and the environment’s outcomes (2) cognition which involves our subjective understanding of our own personal control over a behavior in an environment and (3) behavior which can be passive or active.
Reactance theories explain how we react to uncontrollable life events in a more positive manner than learned helplessness because we perceive that we have more control over the event than helpless individuals. Finally, when people have motivation and the skills to achieve a goal then hope occurs.
The most surprising thing I learned in this chapter was the various ways researchers have tested learned helplessness. I feel really bad for the dogs involved in the experiment but it was really interesting to read about the experiments done with both humans and animals. When the event was perceived to be out of their control both humans and animals remained passive in what they saw as an inescapable situation.
Personal control beliefs encourage behavior by setting the stage for a successful outcome based on our knowledge that we have both the skills and motivation to take action. They encourage behavior by giving an individual the knowledge that they control the outcomes of their actions vs. the environment controlling the outcomes of our behaviors. For example, an encouraged behavior could involve a musician trying out for a solo in a concert. If the person has high personal control beliefs which means they have high self-efficacy and that outcome will be in their favor regardless of the competition, then our personal control beliefs have encouraged our behavior. If that same musician believed that they had the skills to win the solo part but that they probably wouldn’t because another musician trying out is better than them then that musician’s personal control beliefs discouraged his behavior in a negative manner because he/she believed the environment (ie., the other person) had more control over the outcome then they themselves did.
ME TERMS: personal control beliefs, self-efficacy, self-efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, empowerment, mastery modeling program, learned helplessness, contingency, cognition, behavior, verbal persuasion, physiological state, personal histories, vicarious experience, reactance theories, hope
Chapter 9 was about personal control; especially in relation to self-efficacy and personal beliefs about ability and disability. Self-efficacy is someone’s personal beliefs about the likelihood they can or cannot complete a task or goal. This is not related to their actual ability, simply their thoughts about their ability (whether right or wrong). Several things that might influence someone’s thoughts about their ability are their past history, observations of others, and persuasion from others. Some questions one might ask themselves are “will what I do work” and “can I do it”; these are outcome expectations and efficacy expectations respectively. If the responses are high then goal behavior is enforced. Whether enforced or not, self-efficacy can make someone choose where to go, what to do, how much effort to exert, how long to attempt a goal, how to feel, and what to think. Overall, the power of personal efficacy strongly manages all behaviors and thoughts.
In addition, this chapter talked about people who are mastery or helpless oriented. Generally, people who are mastery oriented have higher self-efficacy and perform better. They also feel happier and have more positive emotions associated with them. On the other hand, helpless oriented often give up and experience more negative feelings and thoughts. However, those who are helpless oriented can benefit from therapy that increases coping skills. Self-efficacy is a manageable characteristic that can be altered.
After reading this chapter, the most surprising/interesting thing I learned was that people who are depressed are less susceptible to learned helplessness than their non-depressed counterparts. This is something I have never learned before! I wonder what the implications for counseling are for depressed clients then. If depressed clients “know” that nothing will change no matter what they do, then what is the point of counseling or teaching them coping-skills? There is more reading to be done!
Personal control beliefs encourage behavior by supporting one’s beliefs based on past experiences, watching others do the behavior, and persuasion from others. An encouraged behavior, such as doing homework, can be affected by both high and low self-efficacy. If someone has high self-efficacy and receives a C- on an assignment, then they will maybe be bummed but then they will say “I just have to try harder”. On the other hand, someone with low self-efficacy may receive a C- and say “this is the best I can do” and not try harder. In the end, both people who received C- will have very different outcomes for their final grades in the class.
ME Terms:
personal control, efficacy expectations and outcome expectations (can I do it & will what I do work), self-efficacy, personal behavior history, observation of similar others, verbal persuasions, activities and environment, amount of effort and persistence, thinking and decision making, and emotionality, mastery motivational orientation, helpless motivational orientation, giving up, learned helplessness
Chapter 9 deals with personal control beliefs. The beliefs discussed are self-efficacy, mastery beliefs, and learned helplessness. I was surprised to find out that I could effect my own behavior depending on how well I think I could do it.
Before the book delves into those subjects, however, it explains the two different types of expectancies (i.e. efficacy and outcome expectation). Efficacy expectation is one’s judgment on their ability to fulfill a task. Outcome expectation is a judgment that an action may cause a certain outcome. These two things are required for any kind of goal-directed behavior. If one is missing than it is very likely that the behavior will be avoided. For example a person brushing teeth does it because they know it will prevent plaque and keep them from the dentists. The same action of brushing one’s teeth would be ignored if it was expected to not help very much.
Self-efficacy is how well an individual thinks he/she can do on a task. The behavior of playing football is used as an example here. Personal history can increase or decrease the efficacy a person may have toward playing football. If a person had experience playing and they know they have performed moderately well in the past then they will have a fairly high efficacy-rating. Yet, if someone had hardly any experience and know that they performed dreadfully, then they will have a low efficacy. Vicarious experience also effects efficacy. An unskilled person watching the football skills of someone of similar size will gain a higher efficacy of their ability. Someone skilled watching a large professional athlete will gain less efficacy of their ability. Physiological states also may increase or decrease efficacy. In this example have fatigue and pain would lower one’s efficacy. Absence of fear, tension, and mental confusion will actually heighten one’s efficacy. Verbal persuasion also has the ability to increase/decrease efficacy. Positive stimuli from verbal encounters will raise efficacy while negative verbal stimuli will decrease it. A couch may give a good speech to a football play and they will suddenly think that they can perform better.
Mastery beliefs are the perceive control one has over attaining desirable outcomes and preventing aversive ones. Having strong perceived control will make an individual see a clear link between actions and outcomes. Having a weak perceived control will make an individual see no relationship between actions and outcomes. Mastery motivational will keep one on track toward behaviors despite setbacks. Helpless motivational a person will respond to failures by running away and stopping action. An individual will experience setbacks and failing when trying to become good at football. Being able to have a strong sense of perceived control and having a mastery motivational outlook will greatly improve chances of enduring the goal.
Learned helplessness arises when people believe that they have absolutely no control over the outcomes of their actions. Contingency, behavior, and cognition are the three components that contribute to learned helplessness. Being unable to do well on the football field no matter how hard you tried would mostliekly lead to learned helplessness.
Terms: self-efficacy, learned helplessness, mastery beliefs, efficacy expectation, outcome expectation, personal history, physiological state, vicarious experience, mastery motivational, helpless motivational, contingency, behavior, cognition
Chapter 9 discusses the motivation to exercise personal control over what happens to you. It speaks about the power to produce favorable results and to rely on past experiences and personal resources. The first principle discussed in this chapter is efficacy expectations. This is a judgement of one's capacity to execute a particular act or course of action. It estimates how likely it is that certain consequences will follow once that behavior is enacted. Along with this is outcome expectations. This is a person's ability to try and predict how their behavior will produce a certain outcome. Though they are interrelated, these principles are separate, casual determinants to the initiation and regulation of behavior. If a person has high efficacy expectations then they are more likely to more energetic and goal directed. Understanding whether people are high or low in efficacy expectations will help us understand better people's reluctance in doing certain projects.
Another idea discussed is that of self efficacy. Self efficacy is defined as "one's judgement of how well (or poor) one will cope with situation with given skills one possesses and the circumstances one faces". It is important to note that self efficacy is not synonymous for ability. Self efficacy speaks more of your own skills used in light of trying and difficult circumstances. Self efficacy is formed through personal history, through observation of others, verbal persuasion from others, and also your physiological state (ex: situation that would make your heart rate and perspiration increase).
Self efficacy effects many aspects of life. First, it effects our choice in activities and selection of environments. We want to be in things and places where we feel capable and able to thrive in. Next, it effects the extent of our effort and persistence put forth during performance. This is the main principle when speaking of facilitating effort and our expectation of how we think we will recover if stress arises. Self efficacy also effects our quality of thinking and decision making. This is because is gives or does not give us the confidence in solving problems. Finally, self efficacy effects our emotional reactions. It is the central role in determining how much stress and anxiety should be exerted in certain situations. Self efficacy helps us determine whether or not we can overcome threatening or stressful emotions.
Self efficacy also provides empowerment. Empowerment is possessing the knowledge, skills, and beliefs that allow people to exert control over lives. It expresses itself in the face of threat. Along with empowerment comes mastery beliefs. These help in ways of coping and functioning. There are also programs in which people can be helped into becoming masters of their skills. These are called mastery modeling program. These are formal procedures to utilize the four sources of self efficacy as a means to advance from anxious novices to confident masters of craft.
The opposite of mastery is learned helplessness. Learned helplessness comes from the outcome expectancies that the situation is uncontrollable. People who expect desired something good, but then something bad (like getting sick) happens in spite of their behavior, they develop this learned helplessness. I was rather surprised by the study with dogs. I have learned about this before but I did not apply it so much to motivation, though now it seems so obvious. There are four components to learned helplessness. The first is contingency which refers to "the objective relationship between a person's behavior and the environment's outcome". The next is cognition which has three cognitive elements. The first is our bias which is the illusion of our control, the second is attributions which is the reason for why we think we do or don't have control, and then finally expectancies. The third component is behavior which is basically how we cope to responses. These responses can either be passive and lethargic (stop caring) or active and assertive.
Personal control beliefs serve to motivate or discourage behavior because how we believe an outcome will turn out depends heavily on whether we feel it can be accomplished. If a student has always done well in school, had good study habits and routines, and were able to communicate well with educators, then then they will gain confidence in their academic performance. If they feel that they have the ability to be successful then they will be more likely to actually be successful. So, lets say they get into college and classes prove to be harder then expected, if the student has high self efficacy they will be more likely be able to handle the stress.
Lets look at another situation, if there are two brothers, one is really athletic while the other is not. The one un-athletic brother is constantly compared to other brother by coaches and parents. He gains a learned helplessness because he does not have natural ability and feels as though he cannot control this. Because of this, he will steer clear from sports and athletics and possibly feel anxiety when having to perform.
Terms: efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, self efficacy, empowerment, mastery, mastery modeling program, learned helplessness, emotionality, persistence, effort, verbal persuasion, behavior, cognition, contingency, lethargic response, assertive responst
Chapter Nine is titled, “Personal Control Beliefs”. It begins by demonstrating a phenomena called expectancy. Expectancy is when one makes a prediction of how likely it is that an event will occur. The belief one has about how much they influence the outcome is what is known as perceived control. There are two types of expectations: Efficacy expectations, outcome expectations. Their names are pretty self-explanatory. The individual will have efficacy expectations that affect their behavior, (self-efficacy is the judgment one has of how well they can do) therein lies the outcome expectations before the actual outcome occurs. Self-efficacy stems from one’s history, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and physiological activity (or, being successful in your mannerisms that lead to the positive outcome). Self-efficacy leads to how one makes their choices, persists, their emotional reactions, thinking, decision making, and effort. Next the chapter dove into empowerment. The three things that make up empowerment are: Knowledge, self-efficacy beliefs, and skills. When a person feels as though he or she has gained the appropriate amount of knowledge, believes they have the skills without having to ask others to do a task correctly, and has strong self-efficacy beliefs, they will feel empowered. Mastery beliefs are a good to have during times of need. They are the control one believes they have over getting the right conclusion while also preventing undesirable conclusions. If an undesirable conclusion is reached, there are fourteen ways the book provides for coping:
1. Approach vs. Avoidance
2. Social vs. Solitary
3. Proactive vs. Reactive
4. Direct vs. Indirect
5. Control vs. Escape
6. Alloplastic vs. Autoplastic
These affect your way of portraying yourself during failure. During failure, someone who has mastery motivational orientation will be strong during failure and view failure feedback as helpful or constructive criticism. A helpless motivational orientated person will view themselves as fragile and view failure feedback as a negative thing about themselves. Which brings us into, learned helplessness. Learned helplessness has been studied on dogs who will continue to let an aversive stimuli (a shock) occur even though there is a highly potential route towards not receiving a shock. Humans react in the same way; helplessness is most certainly learned via the environment. People feel as though they no longer have control over the outcomes that happen to them—only the environment does. Learned helplessness is a motivator to stay in a bad situation. There are three components to this behavior:
1. Contingency
2. Cognition
3. Behavior
There are also three effects of learned helplessness:
1. Motivation deficits
2. Learning deficits
3. Emotional Deficits
Chapter nine then weaves into how an individual explains bad events. One who says bad events are unstable yet controllable has an optimistic explanatory style; while, one who says bad events are stable and uncontrollable has a pessimistic explanatory style. Likewise, hope has two ways of thinking: agentic, people feel they can accomplish a given task, and pathways, people will try hard to find a way to accomplish the task.
The most interesting thing I learned was about the reactance theory. The reactance theory is the psychological and behavioral effort to re-obtain any freedom that was threatened or taken away from them. One of the examples given was when kids do exactly what they were told not to do. Upon reading this I found myself smiling and nodding in agreement as I recall my 7 year old brothers past behavior.
Personal control beliefs motivate and discourage behavior in countless ways. Literally every little decision one makes may depend on their self-efficacy beliefs on whether or not they should even attempt to try in the first place. For example, an encouraged behavior such as studying for a test, is influenced by self-efficacy by first stating whether or not the individual feels competent in their studying techniques. Ways of coping with the problem of the upcoming test may interfere—does the person want to study alone, or with people? Does the person already feel empowered in this area? Do they feel they have the knowledge, self-efficacy, and skills already and possibly do not need to study any longer? An example of how personal control beliefs influence a discouraged behavior could be the exact opposite of the first example: not studying for an exam at all when one needs to and should. This behavior could be affected by the person’s way of coping—in this case, avoidance, and escape. Maybe they have studied before and still failed a test so they now feel as though they do not control the outcome—learned helplessness. In this case, they are helpless motivational oriented and view failure feedback as negative.
Terms: Self-Efficacy, ways of coping, empowerment, knowledge, skills, avoidance, escape, failure feedback, learned helplessness, helpless motivational oriented.
People to believe that they have power to produce favorable results and that the enviroment will be responsive. Efficacy Expectation is the I can do it part which is about the ability to complete an action. Outcome expectation is the "will what I do work?" part, which comes after the action. Self efficacy predicts approach and avoidance behavior. Sources for self efficacy come from 4 different places: 1)personal history: This is the most influential of the four and it results from a person's past experiences. 2) observation: This is the other important one it is when someone watches a similar person preform the task and then think they can do it has greater impact when the person is more similar and when the person observing has less experience.3) pep talks theses are not all that influential and only create temorary flucations in efficacy and also relies on the credibility of person goving the talk. 4)Physiological states- such as rapid heart beat when experiencing anxiety.
Self efficacy effect the coice of activties, extent of effort, quality of thinking, and emotional reactions.self efficacy leads to a quick recovery of self assurance after failing. Hleplessness is learned, reference multiple experiments with dogs and people. Contingency, cognition, and behvaior are all components of helplessness. Deficits in motivation , learning and emotions will occur from helplesseness.
There are two different explanatory styles, opptomistic, pessimistic. opptomistic see failures as unstable and controllable, where as pessimistic see it as stable and uncontrollable.
What was the most surprising thing you learned? The most suprising thing I learned was that if you change the way you think about things and eliminate the learned helplessness it will change a lot of other aspects in life and also that depressed people are better at guessing how controllable a situation is.
How do personal control beliefs serve to encourage (motivate) or discourage behavior? If someone believes that they are capable of completeing a behavior they are going to do it as opposed to someone who feels that things are out of their control and that no matter what they do it wont make a difference so why bother
Provide an example of each (an encouraged and discouraged behavior) and specifically discuss how personal control beliefs would influence those behaviors. IF someone is encouraged to get a good grade on the exam it is sort of like a pep talk which is the third item for building self efficacy , if they feel as though they have control of the situion they will much easier attain the good grade and even if they were to fail they would not take it personally and would try harder.
Terms used: efficacy expectation, outcome expectation, self-efficacy, avoidance, personal history, observation, phsiolgical states, mastery beliefs, learned helplessness, contingency, cognition, behavior, motivatonal deficits, emotional deficits, learning deficits,
Chapter 9 is about personal control beliefs. There are two kind of expectancy. They are efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. An efficacy expectation is a judgment of one’s capacity to execute a particular act of course of action. An outcome expectation is a judgment that a given action once performed, will cause a particular outcome. These two types of expectancy are casual determinants to the initiation and regulation of behavior. Both efficacy expectations and outcome expectations must be pretty high before behavior becomes energetic and goal directed.
Self-efficacy is when an individual organizes and orchestrates his or her skills to cope with the demands and circumstances he or she faces. This is not the same as “ability”. Self-efficacy beliefs arise from 1) one’s personal history in trying to execute that particular behavior 2) observations of similar others who also try to execute that behavior 3) verbal persuasions and 4) physiological states such as a racing heart versus a calm one. Self-efficacy has many effects on our everyday behavior. It affects what choices we make, our effort and persistence, our thinking and decision making, and our emotions.
Mastery beliefs reflect the extent of perceived control one has over attaining desirable outcomes and preventing aversive ones. The reactance theory explains why people sometimes do the opposite of what they are told to do. A reason why this sometimes happens if because of reactance and helplessness.
A surprising thing that I learned in this chapter was that people do the opposite of what they are told to do sometimes because of helplessness. This is interesting to me because you would think that if someone was helpless and didn’t really know how to do something they would seek help and try to do it right.
Personal control beliefs encourages and motivates behavior because with these beliefs you can influence what may happen to you or others in the environment. When people feel they have the ability to influence what happens it makes them more motivated to do the action better. An encouraged behavior could be recycling. People may recycle more because they know it will make a difference for the environment. Personal control beliefs may discourage behavior because they might not have gotten any results from the activity in the past. An example might be with dieting and exercising. Someone may know they need to diet and exercise in order to become healthier and lose weight, but may not do it because in the past it didn’t help them to lose any weight.
Terms used: personal control beliefs, efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, self-efficacy, mastery beliefs, helplessness, motivation
Chapter 9 addresses how the beliefs we have about our capabilities, our thoughts on how we do things influence our actual performance. The first chapter deals with the types of expectancy and how it translates our self and actions in the control. The self-efficacy is the belief that we have on our abilities or skills. Efficacy of self is just a thought, but may positively or negatively influence how we do things. The mastery Beliefs refer to the perception of control we have over events. If the mastery of people think they have control over events, the helplessness is the opposite, a way of thinking in which people think has no control over what you do.
The learning helplessness is a learned process whereby someone who is facing an aversive stimulus and not find a way to escape the tendency to think that every time you find yourself in that situation again, whatever you do you will think the worst.
The most interesting aspect of this issue in my opinion is the learning helplessness, sometimes when we are faced with a subject, a job or anything else and do not do well on many times, we think that no matter whatever we do and we always go wrong.
This is a fatal way of thinking so you do see people that that perception will make you always fail to help them better cope with these experiences.
How personal do serve to Encourage Control Beliefs (MOTIVATE) Discourage or Behavior?
The Beliefs control are critical for success. For example, people who have high self persistancia Efficacy and effort are more people whose self Efficacy is lower. Unlike people who suffer a learning helplessness whenever they are faced with this traumatic experience to think that whatever they do are doomed to fail, so do not fight.
Provide an example of each (an Encouraged and discouraged Behavior) and specifically discuss how personal control Would Beliefs Influence Those behaviors.
When I was a kid playing tennis a long time. I won many tournaments and did not have any rival that won me over once or twice times ....... except one, I remember a particularly good child, a boy who never reached the finals, but in any event to play against me winning. The first time I face he knew he ought to win easily because he had seen before and was not playing very good, so I began to play very confident and I lost the first set. When I wanted recuperate my game could not and lost the match. After that day I played about 5 or 6 times against ........ and lost in all these instances. By the way, that child did not win a tournament while I get to win more than 30. On the other hand I can think of children who were better than I, two in particular are now professionals, and instead I win those children who in part were as good or better than me, because i always though, “you can do it , you can do it”
TERMS: Personal Beliefs controlled, expectancy, self Efficacy, Beliefs mastery, helplessness, Learned helplessmess.
Chapter 9 blog (3/10) on Personal Control Beliefs
The main topic of chapter nine is about the motivation when it pertains to personal control and how much influence we have in our desired events (how we approach or avoid). Our efficacy expectations are how we pursue a course of action and our outcome expectations are what we think about how things will work out. Specifically our self-efficacy is established from four factors: 1- our personal history, which is based on personal experience, 2-vicarious experiences or interpreting a model of the target behavior, 3-pep talks to persuade someone into action, and 4-physiological state of the body in action or experiencing the negative aspect. The book gives a good example of jumping off the diving board which was good for me because it made for good imagery examples of the four factors.
It was interesting to read how once self-efficacy is formed and incorporated into positive beliefs it empowers self-efficacy. On the other hand components of learned helplessness affects contingency, cognition and behavior it seems to give birth to hopelessness that can undermine learning, a positive self-efficacy and motivation.
It is very interesting to learn how positive internal beliefs motivate and empower an individual and a negative or hopeless internal belief about control in outcomes degrades the self worth motivation and an individual will disengage from the situation or be the powerless victim. This discourages behavior, causes confusion and the book gave a powerful illustration through the dog experiments with electrical shocking in phase one that had profound negative influences on any motivation to pursue options in phase two.
I can now better understand how and why an abused individual goes back to their abuser or doesn’t leave. They may leave several times but most will go back to the abuser. It made me consider how a victim may return to the abuser because they at least know what to expect after so many years compared to the uncertainty and a lack of motivation to change every aspect of their lives when they leave. I know realize how complex and difficult it may be for some women to change with everything so seemingly insurmountable and overwhelming that they may feel incapable of change let alone undeserving of a better life.
Terms: motivational and personal choice, approach avoidance, efficacy expectations, a course of action, outcomes, vicarious experience, pep talks, physiological states, positive beliefs, control, learned helplessness, contingency, cognition, behavior, motivation, powerlessness, disengage, empower, learn, and negative/positive influences.
This chapter is about different Personal Control Beliefs. These include: self efficacy, Mastery Beliefs and Learned Helplessness. Self Efficacy is a person’s ability to know how well, or how poorly, they are at coping with a certain situation. A person with high self efficacy is able to know when they are good and are not good at certain thing. Not everyone has high self efficacy, which results from four main areas: Personal Behavior History (remembering how they acted in the past), Vicarious Experience (watching others who act out the same behaviors you are trying to do), Verbal Persuasion (pep talks from others), and Physiological State (signals that say whether this task is out of your capacity of coping).
Mastery Beliefs is the perceived amount of control a person has over getting desired outcomes and avoiding unwanted ones. When a person does not get their desired outcomes, there are several different ways they may cope with that situation. These include: approach vs. avoidance, social vs. solitary, proactive vs. reactive, direct vs. indirect, control vs. escape, alloplastic vs. autoplastic, problem focused vs. emotion focused.
Learned Helplessness is the psychological state that happens when an individual expects that life’s outcomes are uncontrollable. This happens when a person is unable to attain desired outcomes or prevent undesired ones from happening; the results are independent of their behavior.
The most interesting thing that I learned was about the different ways of coping. We all know that sometimes things happen in life that you have no control over, but I didn’t realize how many different ways there were for coping with situations like that. The book lists 8 of them: approach vs. avoidance (interacting with the problem vs. walking away from the problem), social vs. solitary (act with a team vs. alone), proactive vs. reactive (prevent a problem before it occurs vs. after it already happened), direct vs. indirect (take action yourself vs. asking others to for you), control vs. escape (take charge vs. stay away), alloplastic vs. autoplastic (change problem vs. change yourself), problem focused vs. emotion focused (manage problem causing you stress vs. regulate emotional response).
There are lots of ways that these personal control beliefs can encourage or discourage behavior. A lot of it has to do with how much control you feel you have (or need) over things that are happening in your life. It mostly deals with how well you respond to situations in life that you may not have a lot of control over and how different personalities can change the behaviors from person to person.
TERMS: self efficacy; mastery beliefs, learned helplessness; coping; personal behavior history; vicarious experience; verbal persuasion; physiological state; approach vs. avoidance; social vs. solitary; proactive vs. reactive; direct vs. indirect; control vs. escape; alloplastic vs. autoplastic; problem focused vs. emotion focused;
Chapter nine is about personal control beliefs. These beliefs range from your self-efficacy, mastery, and learned helplessness. There are two different types of self-efficacy, expectations and outcome. An expectation is the “Can I do it?”, the judgment of our ability to accomplish a course of actions. The outcome is the “Will what I do work?”, or the judgment of a performed action will course a certain outcome. Empowerment is what leads into mastery. There are three main parts to empowerment, knowledge, self-efficacy, and skills. Empowering people to have a mastery belief! Mastery beliefs reflect the expected control over an outcome and making sure aversive ones are prevented. Helplessness is the view of yourself when failure accurse. When given back negative feedback some see it as not good and should give up. This is what learned helplessness comes from.
Learned helplessness is when the outcome is uncontrollable. There are three components that can help helplessness grow. Contingency is the first one. What contingency is, is the outcome of a person’s behavior and the environment. The environment can range to many different things, like a person’s home, school, neighborhood ect. Contingency is a random occurrence that can either be controlled or uncontrolled. Cognition is the understanding of the environment. This also has three different elements, biases, attributions, and expectancies. Biases are an “illusion of control”. Attribution is the “why”. It explains why we think we have or don’t have control. And expectancies is bring make our past experiences into the presence. Finally is the behavior part. Behavior is simply learning to cope.
There are three major effects that helplessness can create. Motivational deficits are the unwillingness to try. When a person is expecting or cares about a certain outcome, and that outcome is over turned by the environment, a person becomes eager to make sure the outcomes turn their way. Although, sometimes giving up is the road most taken. This is where the “why try” fits. Learning deficits is number two. This is where there is an interference with one’s ability to learn new things. Due to the uncontrollable environment, people start to believe that they’re outcomes are independent to their actions. Once things turning gloomy, people start having a harder time learning new things. Last is emotional deficits, which most of the time leads to depression. Lets end on a happier not, with hope!
Hope was two different ways of thinking, agentic and path-way. Agentic thinking is when a performers seeming ability to accomplish a goal. Path-way opens up multiple routes to help the performer get to their intend goals.
The most surprising thing I learned was how fall down helplessness can reach. I know that having a feeling of helplessness can bring a person down pretty low, but wouldn’t you want to escape from the darkness and reach a higher place? Meaning why let a small thing as bad feedback slow you down, it sucks to get negative feedback, but it also helps you grow!
The biggest factor in encouraging and discouraging behavior is personal control beliefs. Personal control gives you the everyday motivation to get things done. I think that self-efficacy is the key goal to getting things done and encourages people to get to their ideal goal. Helplessness is definitely the biggest factor in discouragement. Sometime, the things people say, as in feedback can really hurt a person want to continue in their goal.
Terms: self-efficacy, mastery, learned helplessness, expectations, outcome, empowerment, contingency, cognition, behavior, biases, attributions, expectancies, motivational deficits, learning deficits, emotional deficits, hope, agentic and path-way.
Chapter nine discusses personal control beliefs, such as self-efficacy and learned helplessness. The chapter begins by differentiating between two different kinds of expectancy when faced with a task: Efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. In an efficacy expectations model, the person faced with a task asks themselves, "Can I do it?" People faced with this question wonder if they are capable of completing a task. An outcome expectations model asks themselves, "Will what I do work?" After realizing whether or not they can complete a task, will their plan work in order to complete it? In order for the goal to be met, both expectations must be high. The next section of the chapter discusses perceived control. This deals with the the question of whether or not the self can exert control. The authors then discuss self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is defined as one's judgment of how well one will cope with a situation, given the skills one possesses and the circumstances one faces. This is not synonymous with competence. Self-efficacy also require the person to put their ability to use when completing a task. The opposite of self-efficacy is doubt. If someone does not believe they can complete a task, they will likely crush under pressure. Self-efficacy has four sources: one's personal history with the behavior, vicarious observations, verbal persuasions and physiological states. Self-efficacy affects behavior in a few ways. First, they choose to to interact in situations in which they know they have self-efficacy. They will put more effort and persistence in tasks they have self-efficacy for. They will also think differently in times of stress, and be more confident when faced with stress. They will be more emotionally stable when faced with a task as well, and show optimism rather than pessimism. Empowerment is the knowledge, skills and beliefs that one acquires through self-efficacy. If one possesses all three of these, they feel empowered. The authors then discuss mastery beliefs. Mastery beliefs are the extent of perceived control one has over attaining desirable outcomes and preventing aversive ones. There are several coping methods associated with achieving mastery. The opposite of mastery is learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is a psychological state that results when an individual expects that life's outcomes are uncontrollable. One must realized that helplessness is LEARNED, not innate. There are three components of helplessness: contingency, cognition and behavior. Helplessness has three effects on behavior including motivational deficits, learning deficits, and emotional deficits. When faced with an aversive event, many people often attribute the reason as something that is beyond their control. Reactance theory examines how people respond to a situation, whether it be optimistic or pessimistic. Those with optimistic reaction techniques tend to be more mentally stable. When one puts all of the preceding together, we get a hope paradigm. Hope is the integration of self-efficacy and mastery vs. helplessness. Those with high hope outperform their low how counterparts.
The most surprising part of the chapter for me was the section on reactance theory. Reactance theory explains how people react to uncontrollable life events. We are all faced with aversive situations in our daily lives. Many take a pessimistic view, or a helplessness response. They believe the situation is out of their control, and lose control. Those with an optimistic reaction however, try to regain control. I thought this was interesting because I have always been told I am a pretty careless guy. When I am confronted with uncontrollable situations, I always tell myself 'It won't affect my life in a year', and usually feel better soon after. I never realized that this was better for my mental health!
An example of encouraged behavior would be a pep talk from a coach before a big football game. This is an example of a source of self-efficacy. The more feelings of efficacy a coach can instill in his players, the more likely they will be to persist in achieving their goal, winning. During the verbal persuasion, a coach may mention past victories in which the team overcame a big challenge and get them pumped up physiologically in order to increase efficacy. An example of discouraged behavior is a student getting an F on an examine. They would likely feel like they have little contingency over their academic situation. They may think pessimistically and transfer the blame onto an uncontrollable event, such as bad teaching or a hard test. This could discourage a student from emitting their studying behavior in the future, assuming they do not take on the mastery paradigm.
Terms: self-efficacy, learned helplessness, efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, perceived control, empowerment, mastery beliefs, learned helplessness, reactance theory, hope
Chapter 9 is about personal control beliefs. Personal control relies on several different things. One of those things is expectancy. Expectancy is a person’s prediction of the probability of an event happening. There are two kinds of expectancy: efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. Efficacy expectations are expectations about yourself and your ability to emit a certain behavior. These expectations are based solely off the individuals’ likelihood of completing something. Outcome expectations is “a judgment that a given action will cause a particular outcome” (pg. 231). This refers to how likely it is that a certain outcome will follow a behavior. Both types are important in determining why someone emits a behavior and how they go about it.
Another aspect of personal control is perceived control. There’s a model that helps to understand this concept. It’s a cycle beginning with “Self”. Self is the person involved in the situation. “Action” is the behavior emitted to reach a conclusion. “Control” is the conclusion, also called the ends. This model is related to efficacy and outcome expectations because efficacy expectations helps lead the “self” to the “action”. Outcome expectations help lead the “action” to the “control”.
Self-efficacy is a concept that is very important to understanding why a person may or may not believe in themselves. “It is the capacity to use one’s personal resources well under trying circumstances” (pg. 233). Having a high self-efficacy means you’re able to use your abilities and skills to handle situations even when difficulties are present. If you have low self-efficacy, you have doubt. This means that difficulties create anxiety and negative feelings. There are four sources of self-efficacy: personal behavior history, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and physiological state. Self-efficacy comes from your personal behavior history because your personality stems from your childhood. If you learned how to deal with difficult situations as a child or teenager, you have better ability to deal with it. The second source is vicarious experience. This is watching others and learning from them. If you see someone emit a behavior and succeed, you have more confidence that you can do it as well. This can also work in a negative way, however, if you see someone who you view similar failing at something. Vicarious experience and personal behavior history are the two sources that have the most affect on people. The third source is verbal persuasion, or pep talks. A pep talk can come from others or from yourself. It’s a way to feel better about your abilities. The fourth source is physiological state. This refers to how you feel physiologically in situations. Your body can tell you how you feel in different situations and it affects your behavior.
Empowerment is another aspect of personal control beliefs. Empowerment is knowing you have the skills, knowledge, and beliefs to have control over your life. This can be a positive thing because it makes a person feel capable of doing something. It could possibly be a bad thing, however, because it could lead a person to think they have more capable than they are.
Mastery beliefs are beliefs that are strong and resilient. People with mastery beliefs see a strong connection between their actions and the outcomes. Having mastery beliefs helps people deal with failure. When people don’t have master beliefs, they can feel helpless. This is also called learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is when an individual learns to feel helpless because they feel that have no control over the outcome. Although this is learned, it can be ingrained in a person’s personality and it’s not a good thing. It’s a negative thing because it can cause feelings of depression due to not having the feeling on control. It affects your motivation, learning, and emotions. There’s a difference between feeling you have no control when you don’t and feeling you do when you don’t. The latter is discussed in the reactance theory. The reactance theory says when individuals are faced with situations in which they perceive control but end up not having it, they work harder to regain that perceived control. This can be a positive thing because it causes people to work harder. Hope is the experience people have when they know ways to achieve their goals. It keeps the drive going. It causes us to create many pathways to reach our goal so that if one pathway ends, we have others to use.
The most surprising thing I learned is the difference between learned helplessness and reactance. I never realized that it makes a huge difference in whether you expect control or expect no control. It does make sense, however, because if I expect that I’m going to have control over something and it turns out that I actually don’t, I try much harder to gain back the perceived control. The opposite is true for when I think I have no control over something, I don’t put much effort into it. Personal control beliefs serve to motivate behavior because your behavior is simply based off your beliefs. If you believe that you can accomplish something and have hope and determination, it’s likely that you’re going to meet that goal. Even if you don’t, you know that you can and you try harder the next time. Also, if you believe that you don’t have control over an outcome or don’t think you can do something, you don’t try as hard and therefore don’t meet your goal.
An encouraged behavior is studying for a test by reading every chapter assigned. The behavior is emitted because the person knows that all the information is important to understand and that it will most likely be on the test. They believe that if they know everything, their chances of doing well on the test are higher than someone who doesn’t. They have self-efficacy to use their skills to be prepared for the test. An example of discouraged behavior is not studying after you didn’t do very well on the first test. Although studying didn’t work the first time, it’s important to continue to try and try harder. The person may feel helpless because they thought they studied hard for the first test but the desired results didn’t show that. Rather than having self-efficacy, they have self-doubt. They doubt their abilities to do well on a test so they don’t bother trying. To combat these emotions, the person needs to have hope and determination that they can do it as long as they believe in themselves and try harder.
Terms: personal control beliefs, expectancy, efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, perceived control, self-efficacy, personal behavior history, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, physiological state, empowerment, mastery beliefs, learned helplessness, motivation, reactance theory, hope
Chapter nine discusses the aspect of personal control. How people feel about the control they have over life determines how much motivation people have to accomplish goals. People develop a sense of how much control they have over life based on their expectations that have been developed from birth to the present day. Ultimately, they boil down to two kinds of expectations. Efficacy and outcome. The first relates to predictions on how capable someone is while the second relates to what the outcome will be.
The chapter talks about Self-efficacy and its importance in achieving goals. Self-efficacy is based on personal behavior history, observations of others, verbal persuasions from others, and physiological states. The level of self-efficacy can be said to determine how much effort the individual will put forth to achieve their goal. The level of motivation can be observed in approach vs. avoidance behavior, persistence, quality of thinking and decision making, and emotional reactions.
On the opposite of self-efficacy is learned helplessness. This results when an individual believes that they have no control over their life. This is a momentum trait that will build on itself the more it is observed. Three concepts go a great deal to explain learned helplessness: contingency, cognition, and behavior. Contingency is reactions to the environment, cognition what happens mentally, and behavior is what occurs physically.
Finally the chapter provides discussion of the reactance theory outlining how people respond to uncontrollable events, and how hope affects self-efficacy.
Personal control beliefs serve to encourage or discourage behaviors by providing a framework and a support system to adversity. When that support system is weak, a person can handle minimal adversity before giving up. However when that support system is strong, a person will be able to handle a large amount of adversity and persist onward. This is something that builds on itself or breaks itself down depending on if it is a positive or negative trend.
The example that I will discuss is a golf example. The game of golf is a difficult one that takes time to master. In fact some believe that it is impossible to play a perfect round, so it can never be mastered or completed; only attempted. In essence, it is an endless path of persistence that will be continued or disregarded. Personal control beliefs can affect the amount of time one is willing to persist at golf. A person can pick up a golf club, try to hit the ball and miss several times. They will then put down the club and walk away. This exhibits low self-efficacy and low personal control belief. Or a person can work hard and come back day after day until they can hit the golf ball proficiently. This would be the opposite with high self-efficacy and high personal control belief. Personal control beliefs are affected by everything prior to this moment. In this specific example, if a person with low self-efficacy and low personal control beliefs would take up golf on their own, they would most likely fail. If they enlisted the help of a professional who gave golf lessons, their chances of success would increase greatly, not only because of the expert advice, but also because of the increased self-efficacy that would be nurtured and built based on interactions with the professional.
Terms: self-efficacy, approach vs. avoidance, personal control belief, learned helplessness, contingency, cognition, and behavior
Read chapter 9. Summarize the chapter.
Chapter 9 is about personal control beliefs. It starts off by talking about expectations. Expectations are a prediction of how likely it is that an event will occur. There are two kinds of expectancies which are efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. Efficacy expectation is a judgment of ones capacity to execute a particular act or course of action or "Can I do it?" Outcome expectation is a judgment that a given action, once performed, will cause a particular outcome or "Will it work?" In order for behavior to become energetic and goal directed efficacy and outcome expectations must be high.
Self efficacy is described as ones judgment of how well one will cope with a situation, given the skills one posses and the circumstances one faces. Many people may think that they can describe self efficacy by saying ability instead, but that is not the case. Unlike ability, self efficacy is best displayed in emergency situations. We all know that we can drive on a normal day, use the gas properly, turn, brake, and use the radio, but how would you react when the person in front of you hit a patch of ice then spins out and you start sliding . Will you have the ability to keep your composure or will you just panic and forget everything you have ever learned. If you don't believe in your ability at all then you don't have efficacy, you have to opposite of efficacy, doubt.
Self efficacy arises from four places, person behavior, vicarious experience, verbal communication, and physiological state. Personal behavior history comes form believing in your ability and knowing that you can or cant do something because you have done or attempted it before. You can also gain efficacy through vicarious experience which is simply watching other people do things. It gives you the feeling of "If they can do it, I can do it" kind of thing. Someone may come up to you and give you a pep talk which will increase efficacy. This is known as verbal persuasion. The final source of efficacy is your physiological state. It gives you private signals about how your body is feeling about performing a task. A person may display such symptoms as fatigue, muscle tension, or trembling and back down from a situation, or they may reinterpret their symptoms and make them seem positive.
Behavior is effected by self efficacy in a way that the more of it you contain the more likely you are to perform. The four effects of self efficacy include choice, effort and persistence, thinking and decision making, and emotional reactions. Choice is a benefit that all people posses. They may choose to do one thing over another. Most of the time they will chose a project they feel that they are capable of doing and avoid the ones they feel they can accomplish. If people avoid enough tasks because they feel they are not capable doing them they handicap their development. The less a person does the less they will experience the more self doubt they will gain. How much effort you put into something and how long you put forth that effort influence self efficacy. To perform the best, people must use memories of past events to predict the most effective course of action. they must also analyze feedback to assess and reassess the merit of their plans and strategies. When you self efficacy is strong emotions can be kept at bay and keep your stress and anxiety levels down.
Empowerment stems from knowledge, beliefs, and skills and allows people to exert control over their lives. when on has strong beliefs they feel a strong connection between actions and outcomes. There are many ways of coping with a situation and the way in which a person chooses to cope will display how much mastery one exercises over outcomes. Some people will even respond to failure by by staying focused on the task and try to achieve mastery event though they may run into setbacks, this is known as mastery motivational orientation.
Learned helplessness is, for the most part, the opposite of mastery. It is when a person believes that their life's outcomes are uncontrollable. It is something that a person learns from their past experiences. It has three components; Contingency, cognition, and behavior. These three components teach people what to expect in the events in their lives. Contingency refers to the objective relationship between a person behavior and the environments outcomes. It ranges from things that happen randomly to things that happen in perfect synchronization with a persons voluntary behavior. Three cognitive elements are particularly important; biases, attributions, expectancies, which are the subjective personal control beliefs we carry over from past experiences into current situations. There are also three effects of learned helplessness. The first is motivational deficits which consist of a decreasing willingness to try. The second is learning deficits that consist of an acquired pessimistic set that interferes with ones ability to learn new response-outcome contingencies. The final is emotional deficits and those consist of affective disruptions in which lethargic, depressive emotional reactions occur in situations that call for active, assertive emotion.
There are two types of explanatory style. Optimistic explanatory style people believe that explain bad events with attributions that are unstable and controllable, while pessimistic explanatory style people explain bad events with attributions that are stable and uncontrollable.
Reactance theory is something that predicts that people experience reactant only if the expect to have some control over what happens and people react to a loss of control by becoming more active. The big difference in predicting whether an individual will show reactance or helplessness is the perceived status of the uncontrollable outcome. As long as the person perceives that coping behavior can effect outcomes, reluctance behaviors persist.
Hope comes our of a two-part motivation system. When people have motivation to work toward their goals and know ways to achieve those goals they experience hope.
What was the most surprising thing you learned?
All they ways of coping with things and how you can prevent having to deal with certain ways of coping by dealing with another way.
How do personal control beliefs serve to encourage (motivate) or discourage behavior? Provide an example of each (an encouraged and discouraged behavior) and specifically discuss how personal control beliefs would influence those behaviors.
Personal control beliefs really motivate me in school. When I do well on a test I know I can do well on the next test, or if someone tells me they know I can get an A I feel confident that I can do it, or if I feel confident going into a test I feel much more calm and most of the time do quite well. School can also discourage me sometimes as well. I have crammed for a test before and didn't do so well so I have been discouraged from doing that again. When I have been put into teams in classes I have never does as well as I have like so I naturally have a negative feeling towards teams and try my hardest not to be involved in them. I have/do feel learned helplessness. Right now I dont know exactly where I want to be when I graduate. I know my major but after that I am stuck so I feel that where ever life takes me I will go. I tried to make decisions like that before (i.e. picking a major. I hated all the ones I picked that I 'feel' in the one I am currently in and love) but ended up not liking where I was. So I feel that if I try and pick something I wont like it and that it just needs to find its way to me.
Provide a list of terms at the end of your post that you used from the chapter.
Efficacy expectations, Outcome Expectations, Expectancy, sources of self efficacy,effects of self efficacy, mastery motivational orientation, learned helplessness, contingency, cognition, behavior, optimistic explanatory style, pessimistic explanatory style, reactance theory
Chapter 9 covers personal control beliefs. Expectancy is a subjective prediction of how likely it is that an event will occur. There are two types of expectancies. An efficacy expectation is a judgment of one’s capacity to execute a particular act or course of action (Can I do it?). An outcome expectation is a judgment that a given action, once performed, will cause a particular outcome (Will what I do work?). Both efficacy and outcome expectations must be reasonably high before behavior becomes energetic and goal directed. Self-efficacy is defined as one’s judgment of how well (or poorly) one will cope with a situation, given the skills one possesses and the circumstances one faces. Self-efficacy is not the same as ability. Competent functioning requires not only possessing ability, but also the capacity to translate those skills into effective performance, especially under trying and difficult circumstances. The opposite of efficacy is doubt. Self-efficacy predicts the motivational balance between wanting to give it a try on one hand and anxiety, doubt, and avoidance on the other. Self-efficacy beliefs arise from (1) one’s personal history in trying to execute that particular behavior, (2) observations of similar others who also try to execute that behavior, (3) verbal persuasions (pep talks) from others, and (4) physiological states such as a racing heart versus a calm one. Self-efficacy beliefs affect (1) choice of activities and selection of environments, (2) extent of effort and persistence put forth during performance, (3) the quality of thinking and decision making during performance, and (4) emotional reactions, especially those related to stress and anxiety. Because self-efficacy beliefs can be acquired and because self-efficacy beliefs enable such productive ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving, self-efficacy serves as a model for personal empowerment. Empowerment involves possessing the knowledge, skills, and beliefs that allow people to exert control over their lives. A formal program to empower people through self-efficacy training is to employ a mastery modeling program where an expert works with a group of novices to show them how to cope with an otherwise fearsome situation. Mastery beliefs reflect the extent of perceived control one has over attaining desirable outcomes and preventing aversive ones. Efficacy expectancies are the building blocks of self-efficacy, just as outcome expectancies are the building blocks of learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is the psychological state that results when an individual expects that life’s outcomes are uncontrollable. Learned helplessness theory features three components: contingency, cognition, and behavior. Once learned helplessness occurs, it leaves motivational, learning, and emotional deficits. There are two types of explanatory style. A person that has an optimistic explanatory style tends to explain bad events with attributions that are unstable and controllable. A pessimistic explanatory style manifests itself as the tendency to explain bad events with attributions that are stable and uncontrollable. The term reactance refers to the psychological and behavioral attempt at reestablishing (reacting against) an eliminated or threatened freedom. When confronting a situation that is difficult to control, individuals show an initial reactance response by becoming increasingly assertive in their psychological and behavioral attempts to reestablishing control. When people have both the motivation to work toward their goals and when people know ways to achieve those goals, they experience hope. The first part of hope involves a “can do” belief when it comes to accomplishing personal goals. The second part of hope involves clear pathways, or the belief that one has multiple and controllable pathways to those goals. The most surprising thing to me in this chapter was the Seligman and Maier study on dogs in 1967. I had never thought about the fact that helplessness was learned. I found it even more interesting that the same concept of learned helplessness occurred in human studies also. The desire to exercise personal control is based on a person’s belief that they have the power to produce favorable results. They need to both believe they have the ability to do an action (can I do it?), and also the action will cause a particular outcome (will what I do work?). An example of a personal control belief encouraging a behavior could be a student trying to get an A on a math test. If the student has self-efficacy or feels they have what it takes (because of their past history of understanding math, seeing that they do better than similar class mates, get encouragement form the teacher, and do not get nervous for the test), they will be motivated to explore math further, cope well under pressure, and set a high goal of an A on the test. If a different person has low self-efficacy when it comes to math because math is difficult for them they often get poor grades in comparison to their classmates, they get told often that they are not meeting standards, and get very nervous for the test; they will not set a high goal for this test. Instead, they will experience doubt and crack under pressure. They will experience thoughts of distress, anxiety, and helplessness. Because of their perceived deficiency, and lack of perceived control, they will be discouraged from pursuing high goals in math and probably will avoid taking any more math related courses. This in turn will further their learning deficits and they may become apathetic about learning.
Terms Used: personal control beliefs, expectancy, efficacy expectation, outcome expectation, self-efficacy, effort and persistence, empowerment, mastery modeling program, perceived control, learned helplessness, contingency, cognition, behavior, optimistic explanatory style, pessimistic explanatory style, reactance, hope, apathy
Chapter 9 was all about personal control beliefs. The desire to exercise personal control is predicated on a person's belief that they have power to produce favorable results. Expectancy is a subjective prediction of how likely it is that an event will occur. There are two kinds of expectancy: efficacy and outcome expectations. Efficacy expectation is a judgment of one's capacity to execute a particular act or course of action; a person with this kind of expectation has a "Can I do it?" outlook. Outcome expectation is a judgment that a given action, once performed, will cause a particular outcome; a person with this kind of expectation has a "Will what I do work?" outlook. Efficacy and outcome are separate, causal determinants to the initiation and regulation of behavior. They must be reasonably high before behavior becomes energetic and goal-directed. Perceived control follows the same concept as expectancy (except it uses self, action, and control as the names) but with an added part. In the perceived control model, self and control are connected. Self-efficacy has two definitions. It is a more generative capacity in which the individual organizes and orchestrates his or her skills to cope with demands and circumstances he or she faces. It also is one's judgment of how well or poorly one will cope with a situation, given skills one possesses and circumstances one faces. Self-efficacy is not the same thing as "ability." It is used to improvise ways to best translate personal abilities into effective performance. The opposite of self-efficacy is doubt; this leads to anxiety, confusion, negative thinking, and aversive physiological arousal and body tension. There are four sources of self-efficacy: personal behavior history (past attempts of the same behavior), which is the most influential; vicarious experience (modeling); verbal persuasion (pep talks - coming from others or within); and physiological state. There are also four effects self-efficacy has on behavior: choice (selection of activities and environments), effort and persistence, thinking and decision making (doubt deteriorates but efficacy buffers quality), and emotionality (optimistic vs. pessimistic; determining how much stress/anxiety is in a situation). Enpowerment involves possessing knowledge, skills, and beliefs that allow people to exert control over their lives. This can be demonstrated through the Mastery Modeling Program; this involves an expert model and a group of novices and the model tries to use all four sources of self-efficacy to increase the novices'. Mastery beliefs reflect the extent of perceived control one has over attaining desirable outcomes and preventing aversive ones. This section dealt with ways of coping. These beliefs help deal with failure. When a person doesn't have mastery beliefs, they may feel helpless. This helplessness is learned. Learned helplessness is a psychological state that results when an individual expects that life's outcomes are uncontrollable. The dog-shock experiment was used to demonstrate this information. It was also done with humans and noise. There are three components to learned helplessness: contingency (the objective relationship between a person's behavior and the environment's outcomes and runs on a continuum), cognition (this creates a margin of error between objective truth and subjective understanding due to biases, attributions, and expectancies), and behavior (coping to attain or prevent outcomes exist on a continuum also). There are also three effects of helplessness: motivational deficits (decreased willingness to try), learning deficits (acquired pessimistic set that interferes with one's ability to learn new response-outcome contingencies), and emotional deficits (affective disruptions in which depressive emotional reactions occur when assertive emotion should). Helplessness is somewhat connected with depression. The same expectations cause both, and they both share common symptoms and therapeutic intervention strategies. Contrary to belief, people with depression are not more prone to learned helplessness deficits; it's the individuals who are not depressed who sometimes believe they have more personal control than they actually have. Explanatory style is a relatively stable, cognitively based personality variable that reflects the way people explain reasons why bad events happen to them. There are two types of styles: optimistic and pessimistic. Optimistic style manifests itself as the tendency to explain bad events with attributions that are unstable and controllable compared to pessimistic style that has attributions that are stable and uncontrollable. People that use the optimistic style are often referred to having the rose-colored glasses effect where as people that use the pessimistic style are much more realistic. The chapter then discussed different arguments with information about helplessness, but they were all proved wrong. Within the reactance theory, "reactance" refers to the psychological and behavioral attempt at reestablishing ("reacting" against) an eliminated or threatened freedom. This often coincides with the perception of an uncontrollable outcome. This theory states that people experience reactance only if they expect to have some control over what happens to them. Expectations of control foster reactance but expectations of no control foster helplessness. Finally, there are two beliefs related with hope. The high agency or "can do" belief relates to a person's confidence or efficacy in their capacity to accomplish goals they set for themselves. This is the self-efficacy way of thinking. This belief supports confidence and can be described with the phrase "I can do this." The clear pathways belief says that one has multiple and controllable pathways to those goals. This is the mastery motivation way of thinking. This belief supports optimism and can be described by the phrase "I'll find a way to get this done." Hopeful thinking emerges only out of both ways of thinking.
What was the most surprising thing you learned?
The most surprising thing I learned was that people with depression are not more prone to learned helplessness. You would think that they would be the most helpless; however, with their thinking the most realistic out of everyone, they are more apt to see what's coming and to prepare for it.
How do personal control beliefs serve to encourage (motivate) or discourage behavior? Provide an example of each (an encouraged and discouraged behavior) and specifically discuss how personal control beliefs would influence those behaviors.
Personal control beliefs serve to encourage or discourage behavior because the amount of control you have can affect how much motivation you have to do a task. This is somewhat exhibited in figure 9.8 at the end of the chapter. I discussed in my summary that expectations of control or no control fosters reactance or helplessness. An example of an encouraged behavior is studying for a test. This is an encouraged behavior because the student has a lot of control: how to study, how much to study, what materials to use, etc. Having this kind of control will lead to self-efficacy and a very possible good grade on the test. If the student doesn't do well on this test, they have the new knowledge of what they could do different for the next exam. An example of discouraged behavior is dieting. It may appear to be an encouraged behavior at first but many people will think that they can't do it or that whether or not they lose weight is out of their control. They may begin to doubt their abilities and become helpless.
ME Terms: personal control beliefs, expectancy, efficacy and outcome expectations, perceived control, self-efficacy, doubt, personal behavior theory, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, physiological state, empowerment, Mastery Modeling Program, mastery beliefs, learned helplessness, contingency, cognition, behavior, deficits (motivational, learning, emotional), explanatory style (optimistic and pessimistic), reactance, reactance theory, hope
Summary of Chapter 9.
Chapter 9 discusses our motivation to control and respond to situations in our lives. This is self-efficacy, and it is broken down into efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. Efficacy expectations tell us if we can perform a certain action using our skills and resources, while outcome expectations tell us if that action will be successful. Self-efficacy determines our response during different or unusual circumstances. Our self-efficacy is built from the results of our past experiences, observations of others doing the same action, peer pressure, and physiological status at the time of the decision. So a person would be more likely to perform an action that they have done successfully in the past, that someone else did successfully first, when friends are encouraging the action, and if the person feels calm about the action. Our beliefs about our self-efficacy also affect our behavior in different ways. It changes the actions we choose by guiding our thinking and emotions. Through effort and persistence, our self-efficacy either grows or diminishes. As our self-efficacy grows, a person develops empowerment. This occurs when a person gains the knowledge, skills, and the belief to succeed.
The book then discusses how people cope with the outcomes that they feel they control. There are many different coping strategies to use, but more importantly, how people respond to undesirable outcomes. Mastery beliefs allow a person to become motivated by negative outcomes and motivate the person to do better next time, while helplessness beliefs produce discouragement and usually cause the person to never do the action again. Helplessness beliefs are learned throughout life and are based on our continued experiences.
The most surprising thing learned in Chapter 9.
I was most surprised to learn all of the negative associations with the optimistic explanatory style. I thought being optimistic was more like empowerment and that it was more about confidence even in the face of failure. Learning that it makes a person delusional and exaggerates abilities was not what I expected.
How personal control beliefs serve to encourage or discourage behavior and one example of each.
Personal control beliefs encourage behavior by building experiences that have positive outcomes. From the positive feedback received, a person gains knowledge and skills to build self-efficacy and give the confidence to perform those actions. One example would be speaking in front of large groups. A person is nervous or scared the first time they speak to a large crowd, but as the person practices, gains confidence, and earns positive feedback, the person becomes empowered.
Personal control beliefs discourage behavior when learned helplessness and a pessimistic explanatory style is there telling a person that no matter what they do, it will end in failure. If a person applies for 20 jobs and is never even granted an interview for any of them, the person will eventually give up and not apply for any more jobs. This may eventually lead to depression and compound the person’s problems.
List of terms used in post from Chapter 9: self-efficacy, efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, persistence, empowerment, mastery beliefs, helplessness.
Chapter 9 starts off by explaining two types of expectations: efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. Efficacy expectation is one’s ability to complete a certain task. An outcome expectation is how well one can perform such a task. Understandably, the higher a person’s expectations are, the more goal-oriented that person will become. Everyone deals with self-efficacy, this is how a person believes they will do on a specified task. To understand this concept more we can look at the opposite, which is doubt.
Self efficacy is derived from four sources. The first is personal behavior history or in other words, what happened in previously experiences with the situation. The second is vicarious experience, which would be watching someone else attempt the task first. The third source is visual persuasion, or others such as teachers, coaches or peers convincing us we can accomplish the task. Finally, our psychological state plays an impact because if we are shaking, for example, we may not be able to complete the task.
Self-efficacy also effects our behavior. For example, it will affect our choices because we pursue activities in which we find enjoyment or a purpose. The next important effect self-efficacy has is on our effort and persistence. This is very important because this explains why when tasks become difficult, some people quit and some people try harder. Self efficacy will lead to a quick recovery from setbacks. Thinking and decision making is also influenced because the higher self efficacy a person has, the more capable of surviving a tough situation they are. Emotionality is also effected by self efficacy. This can be explained by thinking about how one would feel before performing a task. If they have low self efficacy, they make get nervous and not perform as well because they do not believe they can.
The next topic discussed is about the psychological need for competence. Empowerment is a huge concept to understand when looking at self efficacy. This is a process of the knowledge, skills and beliefs which people exert to control their lives. A good example of this is when a person defends themselves when they feel threatened.
Learned helplessness is the next topic. As the topic states, helplessness is learned. It has three components, first being contingency which refers to the objective relationship between a person’s behavior and the environment’s outcomes. Next is cognition, which is made of three elements: attributions, biases and expectancies. This will occur between the actual objective environmental contingencies and a person’s understanding of control in such an environment. Finally, behavior is discussed which involves a continuum ranging from very passive to very active. In general, learned helplessness is a voluntary behavior.
There are two explanatory styles. First being a pessimistic style which predisposes people toward giving up in times of failure and setbacks. The other option is an optimistic style which are people who tend to take substantial credit for their successes but accept little or no blame for their failures. Reactance theory is mentioned next, which is referring to the psychological and behavioral attempt to reestablish a eliminated or threatened freedom. Understandably, if a person expects to be in control of important outcomes, exposure to such uncontrollable outcomes will arouse reactance.
For me, this really is not surprising information. This makes sense and is logical to me. To step back and look at how such a common topic can be broken down into such little yet important subtopics is somewhat amazing. Encouraging behavior can come from so many different places such as friends, family, doctors, athletes or experts. If they give advice and encouragement, they are having a positive and motivating influence on an individual. But just the same, if any of those people ridicule or discourage an act, motivation is taken away and hard to overcome alone.
ME: Self efficacy, empowerment, learned helplessness, contingency,pessimistic explanatory style, optimistic explanatory style, reactance.
Chapter 9 is about personal control beliefs. People are motivated when they believe they have what it takes to influence their environment and that the environment will be responsive to their influence attempts. People are dependent on experiences from their past to make predictions about the future and how they will cope with the outcomes. There are two types of expectancy: efficacy expectation and outcome expectation. An efficacy expectation is a judgment of the likelihood that one can behave in a certain way. Outcome expectation is an estimate of how likely it is that particular consequences will come as a result of the behavior being enacted.
Self- efficacy is one's judgment of how well (or poorly) they will deal with a situation with the skills they have and the circumstances they face. Sources of self-efficacy include personal behavior history, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and psychological state. Personal behavior history is when a person learns their current level of self-efficacy from memories of attempting to execute the same behavior in the past. Vicarious experience is when someone observes another person similar to them enact the same actions that they are about to perform. Psychological state is when inefficacy heightens arousal which feeds back to fuel perceived inefficacy. Typically, people will choose to participate in things they believe they are good at and avoid things they are not as good at doing. Self-efficacy is very important to facilitating persistent effort and effectively make decisions. Self-efficacy is needed so people can transmit their knowledge and skills to performing effectively when facing a challenge and have control over any distracting negative thoughts.
Mastery beliefs are the perceived amount of control someone has over reaching desirable outcomes and preventing aversive ones. High levels of mastery beliefs effects the way a person copes with undesirable situations. Learned helplessness is when a person does not believe that they have control over outcomes that occur even if they are a result of their own behavior. Learned helplessness can be divided into three components: contingency, cognition, and behavior. Contingency is the objective relationship between how someone behaves and the outcomes of the environment. Cognition refers to a person's interpretation of the actual environmental contingencies that exist in the world and a person's subjective understanding of their control in these environments. Behavior is how person responds to and copes with outcomes. Learned helplessness can result in motivational deficits, learning deficits, and emotional deficits.
I found the two explanatory styles (optimistic and pessimistic) very interesting. An optimistic explanatory style is the tendency to explain negative events with attributions that are unstable and controllable. A pessimistic explanatory style is the tendency to explain negative events with attributions that are stable and uncontrollable.
The chapter ends with describing reactance theory (how people respond to uncontrollable life events) and hope (when people are motivated to achieve their goals and know how to do so).
An encouraged behavior for me would be to get an education. My personal control beliefs influence this behavior because I know I am capable of attaining a degree and therefore I am working towards doing so.
Terms: control beliefs, expectancy, efficacy expectation, outcome expectation, self-efficacy, personal behavior history, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, psychological state, inefficacy, mastery beliefs, learned helplessness, contingency, cognition, behavior, motivational deficits, learning deficits, emotional deficits, optimistic explanatory style, pessimistic explanatory style, reactance theory, hope
Summarize the chapter.
Chapter 9 mainly focuses on the motivation to exercise personal control over what happens to you. The first topic Chapter 9 covers the two different types of expectancies, efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. An efficacy expectation is defined as a judgment of one’s capacity to execute a particular act or course of action. An outcome expectation is defined as ad judgment that a given action, once performed, will cause a particular outcome. Efficacy expectations estimate if a individual can behave in a certain way where as, outcome expectations estimate how likely it is that consequences will happen once the individual has gone through with the behavior. The main question that efficacy expectations asks is “Can I do it?” Likewise, the main question that outcome expectations asks is “Will it work?”
The next part of the chapter covers self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is defined as one’s judgment of how well one will cope with a situation, given the skills one possesses and the circumstances one faces. The main question that self-efficacy asks is if things start to go wrong during a particular behavior or action do I have the resources within me to handle the situation well and turn things around for the better? An example of self-efficacy is when asked how well one would handle a emergency situation such as a animal attack and if in that situation the person did react well. Self-efficacy doesn’t show up overnight and are formed in multiple ways. The sources of self efficacy are personal behavior history, vicarious experience or viewing another enact the same course of action the individual is about to do, verbal persuasion, and physiological activity such as fatigue, pain, muscle tension, mental confusion, and trembling hands. When self-efficacy beliefs have been formed they contribute to the individual in multiple ways. The effects of self-efficacy are choice or a selection of activities and environments, an increase effort and persistence, higher efficiency in decision making and thinking and reduced stress and anxiety.
The chapter continues to discuss mastery beliefs which reflect the extent of perceived control one has over attaining desirable outcomes and preventing averse ones. The stronger the beliefs are the better the probability of positive a positive outcome. A individuals mastery depends on how they cope with the given situation. There are various ways of coping, approach versus avoidance, social versus solitary, proactive versus reactive, direct versus indirect, control versus escape, alloplastic versus autoplastic, and problem focused versus emotion focused. However if a person does fail, the two ways that they could react are mastery motivational orientation and helplessness.
Mastery motivational orientation is defined as a hardy, resistant portrayal of the self during encounters of failure. Helplessness refers to the person responding to failure by giving up and withdrawing, acting as if the situation were out of the individuals control. An example of helplessness would be if a person tried to open a business and the business fails and that person quits to never open a business again blaming the economy when in fact it was his lack of effort that caused his failure. Helplessness is a learned trait and is built by outcome expectancies. Learned helplessness is defined as the psychological state that results when an individual expects that life’s outcomes are uncontrollable. The effects of helplessness are motivational deficits, learning deficits, and emotional deficits. Some psychologists have even said that learned hopelessness is naturally occurring unipolar depression.
The next concept in the chapter is reactance theory. Reactance theory predicts that people experience reactance, the psychological and behavioral attempt at reestablishing an eliminated freedom or threatened freedom, only if they expect to have some control over what happens to them. The last concept in the chapter is hope. Hope is described as integrating the personal control beliefs literature by showing how self-efficacy and mastery versus helplessness function to provide energy and direction for one’s coping efforts.
What was the most surprising thing you learned?
The most surprising thing that I learned was the results of hopelessness. The results of helplessness are the individual focusing on why they are failing and blame the environment and the lack of their control of the result. This is interesting to me because I have blamed the environment and heard other people say that results were out of their control in the past. If these other people were to adjust to a mastery motivational orientation it would help them to have better long term results.
How do personal control beliefs serve to encourage (motivate) or discourage behavior?
Personal beliefs can serve to encourage behavior by increasing self-efficacy. If a person believes that they can perform well at the particular task there overall results will increase in the long run in contrast to the individual doesn’t believe they can perform well.
An example would be a baseball pitcher who is operating with a high level of self-efficacy on the mound will be more likely to pitch a good game compared to another pitcher in the same situation who is operating with a low level of self-efficacy.
Provide an example of each (an encouraged and discouraged behavior) and specifically discuss how personal control beliefs would influence those behaviors
An example of encouraged behavior based on a strong expectation of personal control would be a businessman continually finding ways to open new businesses even after having failed many times in the past. This individual obviously operates on a mastery motivational orientation as well. An example of an discouraged behavior would be a sprinter who is trying to qualify for the Olympics but fails and quits because he operates on a helplessness motivational orientation.
ME Terms - efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, self-efficacy, mastery motivational orientation, Helplessness, reactance theory, hope
Chapter nine discusses how individuals can influence the outcome by controlling aspects of the environment. That individual would need to believe that he/she can accomplish the task and that the environment would “allow” for this influence. The belief that one can succeed at a particular task is efficacy. Both Efficacy expectations and outcome expectations would have to be at high levels in order for one to act on it. (Become motivated, create goals) When an individual has created these efficacy expectations they are also creating self- efficacy. Self-efficacy explains the ability to utilize an individual’s knowledge and training in a stressed or unpredicted circumstance. Self-efficacy is actually determined by that individual’s previous with outcome, vicariously through others’ previous outcomes, verbal communication (encouragement), and physiological states. Lack of experience with that certain task creates a greater influence from vicarious sources, otherwise personal history has the greatest amount of influence. Self-efficacy has a major influence on an individual’s behavior. It can encourage/discourage the selection of activities, effort, persistence, thinking, decision making, and emotion. The book did make it a point to say that self-efficacy is different from competence. Competence is having intrinsic motivation to search for challenges while self-efficacy is judging your level of success. Self-efficacy is an indicator of level of personal empowerment specifically for ability to efficient use you knowledge and ability to control negative/distracting thoughts.
Mastery-oriented individuals believe that they have control over the environment versus those who believe their actions will not have an influence on the outcome (helpless-oriented). Both of these individuals experience failure but the Mastery-oriented individual recover quickly and understand that their situation will change because they have the power to change it. Mastery-oriented individuals will experience reluctance when their autonomy is threatened. Helplessness is learned through outcome expectancy. Helplessness is influenced by contingency of the environment, cognitive beliefs/associations, and behavior. Helplessness can be detrimental to motivation, learning, and emotion.
The most surprising thing that I learned was the role of self-efficacy and how much it does have a major influence on the outcome. Especially found it surprising that the root cause in anxiety is low self-efficacy. Personal control beliefs influence your motivation to try, motivation to put forth sufficient effort, motivation to persist as long you are confident your behaviors will produce a ideal outcome. If one is helpless-oriented they will think that they have no control over their circumstances and therefore trying to influence the environment is pointless. One example of an individual with low personal empowerment is when I tried to take my friend golfing. From the beginning she negative and was trying to explain to me that this was going to take forever because of her inability to hit the ball although she had never been golfing. Most likely she is doubtful from a vicarious experience. Her first swing she missed the ball and immediately stopped putting forth effort. Due to her limitation of personal empowerment she did not even allow herself to try. Had she been a mastery-oriented individual she might have tried harder after the failed attempt looking for a challenge. A mastery-oriented individual believes that they can change the outcome by learning from these failed attempts. This encourages that individual to continue the task until complete.
Terms: Efficacy, Outcome expectations, Efficacy expectations, self-efficacy, mastery-oriented, helpless-oriented, empowerment, reluctance
Chapter 9 details how personal control is a factor in life decisions, but ultimately isn’t the deciding factor. How a person copes with life’s events depends on our personal history, our observations of others (vicarious experience), verbal influences from others, and our physiological states. The chapter describes self-efficacy as how a person copes with daily circumstances based on using their own self control and the skills that he or she possesses. The two types of expectancy are efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. Efficacy is how we judge that we can accomplish a task. Outcome expectancy is what we perceive the end result to be.
It’s also important to be able to acknowledge these resources and be able to apply them. Our personal attitudes and how we face each situation will foretell how a situation will come about. If we convince ourselves that we will fail, failure will follow. If optimism and encouragement surround the situation then success is more likely, but if we do happen to fail, the failure will be easier to handle.
Mastery and helplessness are two ways of coping. Mastery entails being able to stay focused on a certain task even if failure has occurred before. It’s the motivation to keep pursuing it until it has been completed. If a person is helpless-orientated they tend to avoid trying situations and withdrawing from difficult ones. Other deficits arise along with helplessness. These include motivational deficits, learning deficits, and emotional deficits.
The most surprising thing I learned was that when tests were done between depressed and non-depressed college students, the depressed individuals could judge how much control they had over a situation better than non-depressed individuals. It was also found that individuals without depression seem to think they had more personal control over situations than they actually did.
Personal control beliefs can either encourage or discourage a person’s behavior. It relies on our past experiences to influence our judgment on whether or not we might possess the skills necessary to complete a task. It can also discourage our control in the same way. We may not think we have strong enough skills to complete a task which will put doubt in our mind and even seeing other people fail at a task is enough to discourage a person from attempting it themselves. An example of an encouraged behavior is having a friend ask you to play in a volleyball league with them. Knowing that you have played all throughout high school and played varsity encourages you to consider that you would be an asset to the team. You also know all of your teammates and their skill level is similar to yours which reinforces that you will be evenly skilled as them. A discouraging situation would be if the team you are playing against has mostly males and a couple girls from the college volleyball team on it. Seeing how much more experience they have puts doubt in your ability and your teammates also talk about how they are going to get beaten. This is enough to discourage you and your skills.
Terms: Vicarious experience, physiological states, self-efficacy, efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, Mastery, helplessness, motivational deficits, learning deficits, emotional deficits, personal control beliefs.
Chapter 9 is about personal control beliefs. Perceived control is very important. One part of perceived control is self-efficacy which means how successful you think you could be at something. As efficacy is raised, empowerment develops. As it is lessened, doubt develops. Another important part of the chapter is helplessness. Helplessness is learned and has many consequences. It can make a person feel like they have little or no control over what happens in their life. That can make them passive. Learned helplessness leads to decreased motivation, pessimism and emotional and learning deficits.
The most surprising thing I read is the findings on the study done with helplessness and depression. You would think that depressed people feel less control than non-depressed people but the opposite was shown. This is how the text explained the results. What I see is the depressed individuals having a pessimistic view and the non-depressed individuals having an optimistic view. Optimism may increase a person’s sense of control while pessimism may increase a person’s accuracy when judging their own control. I wouldn’t take this to mean that helplessness is not a factor of depression. I think this study is done in a way that the results are deceiving. They all accurately judged how much control they had in each situation except in the no control situation where the depressed people judged control accurately and non-depressed people overestimated their control. This should be expected when looking at helplessness and depression.
Personal control beliefs encourage and discourage behavior by effecting self-efficacy. Whether you believe you can do something or not determines the effort you put forth towards a difficult task. If you have a strong sense of self-efficacy you are more likely to approach a challenging task, show greater effort and persistence, are better at problem solving, and have positive emotionality about the effort they are putting forth. A strong sense of self-efficacy can encourage persistence. For example, if a person with strong self-efficacy and personal control beliefs is learning to do a new, difficult task or job, they are more likely to keep trying even after failing.
A sense of little or no personal control beliefs about an outcome can lead to feeling helpless. If someone experiences many situations in which they have little control, they start to believe that they have little control over any situation and just stop trying to control anything. Feeling helpless can discourage behavior. When faced with a new and difficult task or job, a person who feels helpless may not even try because they think it won’t matter if they try or not. To encourage behavior in someone who feels helpless, they should be shown how to control certain things and be shown what they can have some control over. If a student is not doing well in school or managing their time and is feeling helpless, they should take steps to create control in their life. They should also set their own mastery goals and how they will achieve those goals. Providing these individuals with a greater sense of control will increase self-efficacy and create a greater effort by that person. If a student feels more in control they may try harder, be less distracted, and feel more capable of doing better in school.
Terms: perceived control, self-efficacy, personal control beliefs, empowerment, doubt, helplessness, passive, pessimism, depression, optimism, persistence, emotionality, effort, control