Reading Notes

Bandura A. (2001). Social cognitive theory: an agentic perspective. Annual review of

psychology, 52, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.52.1.1
Purpose.
the temporal extension of agency through intentionality and forethought, selfregulation by self-
reactive influence, and self-reflectiveness about one’s capabilities, quality of functioning, and the
meaning and purpose of one’s life pursuits.
Main points
INTRODUCTION
The core features of agency enable people to play a part in their self-development, adaptation,
and self-renewal with changing times.
PARADIGM SHIFTS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIZING
Consciousness is the very substance of mental life that not only makes life personally
manageable but worth living. A functional consciousness involves purposive accessing and
deliberative processing of information for selecting, constructing, regulating, and evaluating
courses of action. Agentic factors that are explanatory, predictive, and of demonstrated
functional value may be translatable and modeled in another theoretical language but not
eliminatable.
PHYSICALISTIC THEORY OF HUMAN AGENCY
The human mind is generative, creative, proactive, and reflective, not just reactive. The dignified
burial of the dualistic Descartes forces us to address the formidable explanatory challenge for a
physicalistic theory of human agency and a nondualistic cognitivism.
In the paths of influence, sociostructural influences operate through psychological mechanisms
to produce behavioral effects. We shall return later to this issue and to the bidirectionality of
influence between social structure and personal agency.
CORE FEATURES OF HUMAN AGENCY
Intentionality refers to acts a person performs intentionally. An intention includes planning, but
it also involves actions. "It is not simply an expectation or prediction of future actions but a
proactive commitment to bringing them about". Intentionality does not mean that all of a person's
plans will be brought to fruition. People continually change then plans as they become aware of
the consequences of their actions.
People also possess forethought to set goals, to anticipate likely outcomes of their actions, and
to select behaviors that will produce desired outcomes and avoid undesirable ones. Forethought
enables people to break free from the constraints of their environment. If behavior were
completely a function of the environment, then behavior would be more variable and less
consistent because we would constantly be reacting to the great diversity of environmental
stimuli. "If actions were determined solely by external rewards and punishments, people would
behave like weather-vanes". But people do not behave like weathervanes, "constantly shifting
direction to conform to whatever influence happened to impinge upon them at the moment".
People do more than plan and contemplate future behaviors. They are also capable of self-
reactiveness hi the process of motivating and regulating their own actions. People not only make
choices but they monitor then progress toward fulfilling those choices. (Bandura, 2001)
recognizes that setting goals is not sufficient to attaining desired consequences. Goals must be
specific, be within a person's ability to achieve, and reflect potential accomplishments that are
not too far in the future.
Finally, people have self-reflectiveness. They are examiners of then own functioning; they can
think about and evaluate then motivations, values, and the meanings of then life goals, and they
can think about the adequacy of their own thinking. They can also evaluate the effect that other
people's actions have on them. People's most crucial self-reflective mechanism is self-efficacy:
that is, then beliefs that they are capable of performing actions that will produce a desired effect.
AGENTIC MANAGEMENT OF FORTUITY
A fortuitous event in socially mediated happenstances is defined as an unintended meeting of
persons unfamiliar with each other. Although the separate chains of events in a chance encounter
have their own determinants, their intersection occurs fortuitously rather than by design. It is not
that a fortuitous event is uncaused but, rather, there is a lot of randomness to the determining
conditions of its intersection.
MODES OF HUMAN AGENCY
Social cognitive theory extends the conception of human agency to collective agency. People’s
shared belief in their collective power to produce desired results is a key ingredient of collective
agency. Group attainments are the product not only of the shared intentions, knowledge, and
skills of its members, but also of the interactive, coordinated, and synergistic dynamics of their
transactions. Because the collective performance of a social system involves transactional
dynamics, perceived collective efficacy is an emergent group-level property, not simply the sum
of the efficacy beliefs of individual members.
As globalization reaches ever deeper into people’s lives, a strong sense of collective efficacy to
make transnational systems work for them becomes critical to furthering their common interests.
UNDERMINERS OF COLLECTIVE EFFICACY IN CHANGING SOCIETIES
The magnitude of human problems also undermines perceived efficacy to find effective solutions
for them. Worldwide problems of growing magnitude instill a sense of paralysis that there is
little people can do to reduce such problems. Global effects are the products of local actions. The
strategy of “Think globally, act locally” is an effort to restore in people a sense of efficacy that
they can make a difference.
EMERGING PRIMACY OF HUMAN AGENCY IN BIOSOCIAL COEVOLUTION
Much of psychology is concerned with discovering principles about how to structure
environments to promote given psychosocial changes and levels of functioning. This exogenous
subject matter does not have a counterpart in neurobiological theory and, hence, psychological
laws are not derivable from it.
Humans have created biotechnologies for replacing defective genes with modified ones and for
changing the genetic make-up of plants and animals by implanting genes from different sources.
Conclusion
Humans have created biotechnologies for replacing defective genes with modified ones and for
changing the genetic make-up of plants and animals by implanting genes from different sources.
In a budding biotechnology that is forging ahead in ways that bypass evolutionary genetic
processes, we are now cloning clones and exploring methods that could alter the genetic codes of
humans. As people devise ever more powerful technologies that enable them to fashion some
aspects of their nature, the psychosocial side of coevolution is gaining ascendancy. Thus, through
agentic genetic engineering, humans are becoming major agents of their own evolution, for
better or for worse.
Comments
The Social Cognitive Theory emphasizes that observational learning is not a simple imitative
process; human beings are the agents or managers of their own behaviors (Bandura, 2001).
Based on this idea, Bandura has identified several concepts critical for learning. Human agency
is one of the most important concepts in Social Cognitive Theory.