What is self-efficacy? How it differs from self-esteem and whether it can be raised

Self-efficacy is a psychology term for the belief that “I can do this”. It was proposed in a 1977 paper by Albert Bandura of Stanford University. Bandura called the conviction that one can successfully carry out the behaviour needed to produce an outcome an “efficacy expectation”, and hypothesised that such expectations decide whether people start trying to cope with a difficulty, how much effort they put in and how long they keep going in the face of obstacles and unpleasant experiences. The paper also made clear that expectation alone will not produce the desired performance if the necessary skills are lacking (Bandura, 1977).

In a 2006 guide to constructing self-efficacy scales, Bandura summed it up as people’s beliefs in their capabilities to produce given attainments. These beliefs are not a single global trait but a set of beliefs tied to different areas of life: someone who runs a company may have a strong sense of efficacy for leading an organisation and a weak one for parenting (Bandura, 2006). So speaking of someone’s self-efficacy for a particular task is closer to Bandura’s definition than speaking of a “high self-efficacy person”.

The short answer: self-efficacy tends to be higher in people who do well at work and in school, but when the same people are followed over time, it looks more like the result of what they have already achieved than a force that drives later results. Still, experiments that raised self-efficacy did change health behaviour to some degree. Programmes designed to raise it have mostly had small effects, and higher is not always better. Each point is set out below with the studies and figures behind it.

This guide covers what self-efficacy means and how it differs from self-esteem and confidence, its four sources, how it is measured, how it relates to performance and the debate over which comes first, intervention studies that tried to raise it, and common misconceptions. mind.io has no self-efficacy test, and this guide prints no scale items and no score interpretation. Measures such as the General Self-Efficacy Scale are described only through research, in the section on measurement.

Bandura stressed that self-efficacy should be distinguished from self-esteem, locus of control and outcome expectations. Self-efficacy is a judgement of capability (“can I do this?”), while self-esteem is a judgement of self-worth (“am I a person of value?”), and in Bandura’s words they are entirely different phenomena (Bandura, 2006). If that distinction holds, a person can feel unable to do something and still value themselves, or do something well and still think little of themselves. Ways to build self-esteem are covered in how to build self-esteem.

In questionnaires, though, the two overlap considerably. In data published by the developers of the General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSE), from East German migrants (528 men and 380 women at the first wave), the correlation between general self-efficacy and self-esteem was .51 for men and .59 for women in 1989, and .34 and .40 in 1991 (second wave, 122 men and 102 women; Schwarzer, 2014). One team found in a meta-analysis that measures of self-esteem, locus of control, neuroticism and generalised self-efficacy were strongly related, and suggested they may be markers of the same higher-order concept (Judge et al., 2002). Another team found general self-efficacy more closely related to motivational variables and self-esteem to emotional ones, and concluded that the two can be told apart (Chen et al., 2004). Both papers were read as abstracts.

Self-efficacy also differs from outcome expectations. In the 1977 paper, Bandura separated an outcome expectancy, a person’s estimate that a given behaviour will lead to certain outcomes, from an efficacy expectation, the conviction that one can successfully carry out that behaviour (Bandura, 1977). Believing that “if I study hard I will pass” is a different judgement from believing that “I can study that hard”. Locus of control is different again: it is a belief about whether outcomes depend on one’s own actions or on forces outside one’s control. Bandura’s example is students who believe that good grades depend entirely on their own performance but feel despondent because they believe they lack the capability to perform that well (Bandura, 2006).

How does it differ from confidence? None of the studies read for this guide draws a clear line between the two. Everyday confidence is a broad word, whereas the self-efficacy scales Bandura described ask, activity by activity, how confident you are that you can do each one as of now. Bandura also advised writing items in terms of “can do” rather than “will do”, because “can” is a judgement of capability and “will” a statement of intention (Bandura, 2006). A growth mindset is the belief that human attributes are malleable rather than fixed (Burnette et al., 2013), so it asks something different from self-efficacy, the judgement that one can carry out a given task now. That paper was read as an abstract. The research on mindsets is in the growth mindset guide.

Bandura proposed that self-efficacy is built from four principal sources of information: performance accomplishments (one’s own mastery experiences), vicarious experience (seeing others succeed), verbal persuasion (being told “you can do it”) and physiological states such as tension or a racing heart. The more dependable the source, the greater the change in self-efficacy. The theory was meant to explain how behaviour changes, not to be a personality test, and the 1977 paper drew on treatment studies in which adults whose snake phobias affected their lives received participant modelling (watching a demonstration and then doing it with help), modelling alone, or no treatment (Bandura, 1977).

The four sources are not equally strong. Bandura considered performance accomplishments especially influential because they rest on personal mastery: successes raise expectations and repeated failures lower them, particularly when the failures come early. Vicarious experience relies on social comparison, so it is a less dependable source than direct evidence of one’s own accomplishments, and expectations created by persuasion are weaker because they lack an authentic experiential base, and can be readily extinguished by contrary experience. Physiological arousal is information people partly rely on when judging how anxious and vulnerable to stress they are (Bandura, 1977).

Later research has mostly supported the view that performance accomplishments are the strongest source, with exceptions. A review of school studies concluded that mastery experience is typically the most influential source, but that the strength of each source differs with context such as gender, ethnicity, academic ability and subject (Usher & Pajares, 2008). In a meta-analysis of 61 studies of academic self-efficacy (8,965 people), performance accomplishments had by far the strongest unique association with self-efficacy when the other sources were controlled, and the four sources together explained more in non-STEM subjects (14 studies, R² = .37) than in STEM subjects (47 studies, R² = .22; Byars-Winston et al., 2017). Both papers were read as abstracts, and because the analysis pooled correlations, it cannot show that the sources create self-efficacy.

The best-known general measure is the General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSE), developed in Germany by Ralf Schwarzer and Matthias Jerusalem. It was created to predict coping with daily hassles and adaptation after all kinds of stressful life events, and it has 10 items answered on a 4-point scale (Schwarzer & Jerusalem, 1995). It began in 1979 with 20 items, was cut in 1981 to 10 items and has since been adapted to many languages. A team that included Schwarzer agreed with Bandura that self-efficacy should be conceptualised in a situation-specific way, and described the GSE as aimed at a broad and stable sense of being able to deal with a variety of stressful situations. In data from 19,120 people in 25 countries, its reliability (α) was .86, and the hypothesis that it splits into several factors was rejected in favour of a single factor. The samples were not drawn at random in each country, so the team noted that country differences may reflect who was sampled; this guide therefore compares no countries (Scholz et al., 2002).

The GSE has also been translated into Korean (Lee et al., 1994), Japanese (Ito et al., 2005) and French (Dumont et al., 2000). In the 25-country study the Korean sample had 147 people and a reliability of .88 (Scholz et al., 2002), and in 941 people surveyed in Seoul in 2004 it was .86 (Luszczynska et al., 2005). The only study found that examined the structure of the Korean version on its own surveyed 171 older Korean immigrants with diabetes, recruited through two Southern California congregations serving the Korean community and through social media. Its reliability was 0.81; a two-factor model fitted the data better, but the reliability of one of its subscales, “confidence”, was only 0.54, so the authors recommend using the Korean version as a single factor. They also state that the results cannot be generalised to other populations, and that the COVID-19 pandemic may have affected how participants saw their self-efficacy (Kim et al., 2023). In Japan, a separate 16-item scale, the GSES, was developed (Sakano & Tohjoh, 1986).

Bandura held that there is no all-purpose measure of self-efficacy: a “one measure fits all” approach usually explains and predicts little, because most of the items in an all-purpose test may have little or no relevance to the area in question. The scales Bandura recommended ask people to record, for specific activities in the area of interest, how certain they are that they can do each one, from 0 (“cannot do”) to 100 (“highly certain can do”) in steps of 10, and to avoid scales with only a few steps, which are less sensitive and less reliable. To reduce worries about being judged, answers are given privately without names, and a scale is better given a nondescript title such as “Appraisal Inventory” than “Self-Efficacy” (Bandura, 2006).

Studies have often found task-matched scales predicting better. A review of self-efficacy in academic settings concluded that measures matched to the tasks they are compared with explain and predict related outcomes better than global measures (Pajares, 1996). A Korean academic self-efficacy scale of 28 items in three factors, confidence, self-regulatory efficacy and preference for task difficulty (8, 10 and 10 items), also predicted academic achievement better than a general self-efficacy scale (Kim & Park, 2001). The GSE’s developers themselves advise that a specific scale is better for predicting a particular behaviour (Schwarzer, 2014). General measures have been criticised for possibly low content validity and multidimensionality (Chen et al., 2001), while an item-level analysis found acceptable measurement properties in three general measures, especially at lower levels of self-efficacy (Scherbaum et al., 2006). The four papers in this paragraph other than the developers’ FAQ were read as abstracts.

What about free online “self-efficacy tests”? No study that evaluated a particular free online self-efficacy test was found for this guide. The closest is a 1999 study in which the GSE’s developers collected answers from 1,437 computer users on the web and reported that all psychometric characteristics were satisfactory (Schwarzer et al., 1999). That paper was read as an abstract, and it concerned the developers’ own web survey, not any free test site. The developers state that the GSE has no cut-off score and that they do not endorse sorting people this way, and that their FAQ is the scale’s only documentation (Schwarzer, 2014). A test score is best read as a rough note on how you feel right now, and belief about a particular task is better checked with questions about that task, which is closer to what Bandura advised.

Self-efficacy has been linked with performance in many areas. A meta-analysis of 114 studies of work-related performance (157 effect sizes, 21,616 people) found a weighted average correlation of .38 between self-efficacy and performance (Stajkovic & Luthans, 1998). When personality (the Big Five), intelligence and job or task experience were taken into account, however, self-efficacy added relatively little. It predicted performance in jobs or tasks of low complexity but not in those of medium or high complexity, and task performance but not job performance (Judge et al., 2007). Both papers were read as abstracts, and the abstract does not say whether the .38 was corrected.

Results in education are similar. A 1991 meta-analysis reported positive and significant relationships of self-efficacy with academic performance and persistence across subjects, designs and measures, though their size varied between studies (Multon et al., 1991). A meta-analysis of correlates of university grades (GPA), drawing on 7,167 articles that yielded 241 data sets and comparing 50 correlates, found academic self-efficacy correlated with grades at a medium size and “performance self-efficacy” at a large size, the strongest of the 50 (Richardson et al., 2012). In health behaviour, people in the Seoul sample with high GSE scores were physically active and ate a healthy diet more regularly than those with low scores (Luszczynska et al., 2005). All of these are associations, so they do not show that higher self-efficacy improved performance. The Multon and Richardson papers were read as abstracts.

Showing cause takes experiments. A meta-analysis of 204 experimental tests, in which people were randomly assigned to a treatment that increased attitudes, norms or self-efficacy relative to a control condition, found that changing self-efficacy led to a medium-sized change in intentions for health behaviour (d+ = .51) and a small to medium-sized change in behaviour itself (d+ = .47; Sheeran et al., 2016). The abstract does not say how many of the 204 tests were self-efficacy experiments. Among the studies in this guide, this is the most direct experimental evidence that self-efficacy changes behaviour. That paper was read as an abstract, which does not say how long behaviour was followed.

So which comes first? Bandura’s 1977 paper already said that efficacy expectations and performance should both be measured at key points in the change process to clarify their effects on each other (Bandura, 1977). A meta-analysis of studies that measured the same people repeatedly found a corrected within-person correlation of .23 between self-efficacy and later performance, which shrank to .06 and was no longer significant once each person’s trend over time was controlled. In the other direction, the corrected correlation between past performance and later self-efficacy was .40 and stayed at .30 with the trend controlled. The authors concluded that self-efficacy is primarily a product of past performance rather than the driving force behind future performance (Sitzmann & Yeo, 2013). An analysis pooling 11 academic studies that measured both at two time points (2,688 people) found effects in both directions, but the effect of performance on later self-efficacy (β = 0.205) was larger than the reverse (β = 0.071), and in children only the path from performance to belief appeared. Effects in both directions were stronger in studies whose methods followed self-efficacy theorists’ recommendations (Talsma et al., 2018). Both papers were read as abstracts, and the abstract does not say what the correlations were corrected for.

Some studies have even found self-efficacy moving against performance. A within-person study of 56 undergraduates supported the predictions that the usual positive correlation reflects past performance raising self-efficacy and that self-efficacy can lower later performance, while a second study of 185 undergraduates found self-efficacy positively predicting performance when the goal was difficult (Vancouver et al., 2001). When self-efficacy was raised experimentally for 43 of 87 students playing an analytic game, their performance on the next trial dropped (Vancouver et al., 2002), and among 63 students who answered questionnaires before five class exams, higher self-efficacy within a person went with lower motivation and exam performance, even though the relation between people was positive (Vancouver & Kendall, 2006). Another study found the relation negative when it was unclear what good performance required and positive when that was clear (Schmidt & DeShon, 2010). Vancouver’s group now models self-efficacy as able to affect effort and performance both positively and negatively (Vancouver & Purl, 2017). In reply, Bandura and Locke argued that 9 meta-analyses and goal-setting research contradict these findings (Bandura & Locke, 2003), and Bandura criticised the studies for failing to meet key theoretical, methodological, analytical and measurement requirements (Bandura, 2012). Most of these were small studies of university students, so they should not be read as a rule that high self-efficacy lowers performance, and the debate continues. All the papers in this paragraph were read as abstracts.

Methods with evidence for reaching goals, such as if-then plans and WOOP, are covered in the law of attraction guide, and the link between procrastination and confidence in doing a task well in procrastination: what helps.

Programmes designed to raise self-efficacy have mostly had small effects. In a meta-analysis of 27 physical activity intervention studies in healthy adults (5,501 people), the mean effect on self-efficacy was d = 0.16 (Ashford et al., 2010). Of 1,080 studies found for an analysis of randomised controlled trials to increase physical activity in healthy adults, 20 were included; the interventions raised self-efficacy for exercise tasks by g = 0.208, self-efficacy for overcoming barriers by g = 0.128 and physical activity by g = 0.335 (Higgins et al., 2014). Across 20 studies of automated digital health programmes (5,624 people), the effect was g = 0.190 (Newby et al., 2021). These three papers were read as abstracts.

In a meta-analysis of adults with obesity, the effect on self-efficacy was also small (d = 0.23), while the effect on physical activity was medium-sized (d = 0.50). Of its 61 comparisons, 25 had a control group and 36 only compared before and after, and changes in self-efficacy were not significantly related to changes in physical activity (Olander et al., 2013). Across 30 studies of students’ reading self-efficacy (2,300 treated and 1,957 in control or comparison groups), the effect was g = 0.24 against control groups, g = 0.44 against other treatments and g = 0.36 before and after, and whether a study was published in a journal affected the size of the effect (Unrau et al., 2018). In a meta-analysis of a 6-week self-management course for people with chronic conditions (the Chronic Disease Self-Management Program, CDSMP), the effect on overall self-efficacy fell from 0.35 at 4 to 6 months (5 studies) to 0.20 at 9 to 12 months (3 studies), while the effects on self-efficacy for managing the disease and for managing other symptoms increased at 9 to 12 months. These effect sizes combine randomised trials and before-and-after evaluations (Brady et al., 2013). The Unrau paper was read as an abstract.

Which ingredients went with larger gains? In physical activity studies, programmes that included feedback on one’s own past performance or on others’ performance produced the highest self-efficacy, and vicarious experience was also associated with higher self-efficacy, while persuasion, graded mastery and identifying barriers were associated with lower self-efficacy (Ashford et al., 2010). In an analysis by the same group, also of 27 studies in healthy adults, action planning, providing instruction and reinforcing effort towards the behaviour went with higher self-efficacy and physical activity, and relapse prevention and setting graded tasks with lower levels of both (Williams & French, 2011). The two analyses probably covered the same studies, so they should not be counted as two independent findings, and the abstracts do not explain why graded tasks, which build mastery step by step, went with lower self-efficacy. In randomised trials on healthy eating, stress management was consistently associated with gains in self-efficacy, with weaker evidence for other techniques (Prestwich et al., 2014). For digital programmes, it was not clear which techniques work best (Newby et al., 2021).

The team behind the meta-analysis in adults with obesity warned that, because its own findings compare programmes combining several techniques, they should not be taken to mean a technique has the same effect when used on its own (Olander et al., 2013). The results in the previous paragraph also come from such mixed programmes and share that limit. Some studies compared only before and after without a control group, and factors such as journal publication changed the size of effects. The Ashford, Williams and French, Prestwich and Newby papers above were read as abstracts.

Put into everyday terms, the ingredients that went with larger gains in these studies were making a concrete action plan, getting feedback on your own past performance or on others’ performance, watching others succeed (vicarious experience), learning how to do the task, having your effort recognised and, in the healthy eating trials, stress management. These are tendencies seen across mixed programmes, not an established way to raise self-efficacy. Persuasion, such as being told “you can do it”, went with lower self-efficacy within these mixed programmes, and no study was found that measured whether positive affirmations raise self-efficacy. The research on affirmations is in the law of attraction guide.

Myth 1: Self-efficacy is just another word for self-esteem. Bandura called a judgement of capability and a judgement of self-worth entirely different phenomena (Bandura, 2006). Scores do overlap considerably, and one team suggests the measures may mark the same higher-order concept (Judge et al., 2002), but another found that the two relate differently to motivation and to feelings and can be told apart (Chen et al., 2004). The two are related, but they are not the same thing.

Myth 2: The higher your self-efficacy, the better. In a study of 207 undergraduates who rated their self-efficacy five times for one subject, for two written assignments, two exams and the subject overall, beliefs often did not match grades. Low achievers rated themselves above their performance and high achievers below it, and students who underrated themselves did better on similar later tasks than those who rated themselves accurately or too highly. The authors concluded that self-efficacy is not a self-fulfilling prophecy and that over-efficacious students may suffer in academic self-regulation and performance, while noting that researchers disagree on whether beliefs should match ability to be of most benefit (Talsma et al., 2019). In an analytic game, raising self-efficacy led to overconfidence and more logic errors (Vancouver et al., 2002). Bandura also wrote that when requirements are ill-defined, people who underestimate what a situation demands will show self-efficacy above their actual attainments (Bandura, 1977). That does not mean lower is better. The first two papers were read as abstracts.

Myth 3: Repeating positive affirmations builds self-efficacy. No study was found that directly measured whether affirmations raise self-efficacy. Bandura held that expectations created by verbal persuasion are weaker than those built on one’s own accomplishments and can be readily extinguished by contrary experience (Bandura, 1977). In a meta-analysis of physical activity programmes, persuasion was associated with lower self-efficacy (Ashford et al., 2010). The research on affirmations and self-affirmation is in the law of attraction guide.

Myth 4: A self-efficacy test score tells you who you are. Bandura held that there is no all-purpose measure (Bandura, 2006), and the developers of the general scale say it has no cut-off and that a specific scale is better for predicting a particular behaviour (Schwarzer, 2014). In academic settings, task-matched scales predicted better than global ones (Pajares, 1996; Kim & Park, 2001). Asking how far you feel able to do a particular thing, right now, is closer to Bandura’s approach than relying on a single score.

Myth 5: Low self-efficacy means depression. The two often go together. In the GSE developers’ data from East German migrants, general self-efficacy and depression correlated at −.31 (men) and −.44 (women) in 1989 and at −.27 and −.32 in 1991 (Schwarzer, 2014). Among patients with cardiovascular disease, stronger general self-efficacy went with lower depression (Luszczynska et al., 2005), and in the study that developed the Japanese GSES, a check of the scale’s discriminant power compared depressed patients with healthy people showing moderate to high self-efficacy, and the patients scored significantly lower (Sakano & Tohjoh, 1986). In a study that followed children over time, feeling unable to manage schoolwork and social relationships contributed to depression at the time and later, both directly and through grades, prosocial behaviour and problem behaviour, and in the shorter run children were depressed over beliefs about their academic capability rather than over their actual grades (Bandura et al., 1999). Still, a self-efficacy score cannot diagnose depression. If your mood has been low for more than 2 weeks, take the depression check-in (PHQ-9), read the depression symptoms guide and talk to a professional. The children’s study and the Japanese scale paper were read as abstracts.

Q. Are self-efficacy and confidence the same thing? A. They are used in similar ways but are not quite the same. Everyday confidence is a broad word, while self-efficacy scales ask, task by task, how confident you are that you can do each one now (Bandura, 2006). Even general self-efficacy is described by a team that included Schwarzer as an optimistic and self-confident view of one’s capability to deal with life’s stressors (Scholz et al., 2002). No study read for this guide draws a clear line between the two.

Q. Can I trust free self-efficacy tests? A. No study evaluating a particular free test was found. Even the widely used GSE has no cut-off score, and its developers do not endorse sorting people into high and low groups (Schwarzer, 2014). For predicting a particular task, a scale matched to that task did better than a global one (Pajares, 1996). Treat a score as a rough note only.

Q. Can self-efficacy change? A. Bandura proposed that persisting in activities that feel threatening but are in fact relatively safe strengthens self-efficacy through experiences of mastery (Bandura, 1977), and in academic studies earlier grades affected later self-efficacy (Talsma et al., 2018). It is a belief that can shift as experience builds up, but programmes designed to raise it have mostly had small effects.

Q. How can I build my child’s self-efficacy? A. In children, only the path from grades to later self-efficacy appeared (Talsma et al., 2018), and in school studies mastery experience was typically the most influential source (Usher & Pajares, 2008). Programmes to raise students’ reading self-efficacy had an effect of g = 0.24 against control groups (Unrau et al., 2018). By Bandura’s theory, actually managing a task carries more weight than encouraging words, but this guide does not cover studies that tested that advice itself.

Q. Do people who are good at their jobs have high self-efficacy? A. The two tend to go together: across 114 studies, the correlation between self-efficacy and work performance was .38 (Stajkovic & Luthans, 1998). But when the same people were followed over time, self-efficacy was mainly the result of past performance (Sitzmann & Yeo, 2013), and once personality, intelligence and experience were taken into account, self-efficacy added relatively little (Judge et al., 2007).

Q. Who is Bandura? A. Albert Bandura, of Stanford University, wrote the 1977 paper that first set out self-efficacy theory (Bandura, 1977) and a 2006 guide to constructing self-efficacy scales (Bandura, 2006). Bandura also replied, in 2003 and 2012, to studies claiming that self-efficacy can harm performance (Bandura & Locke, 2003; Bandura, 2012). This guide covers only what those papers say.

Q. What are people with low self-efficacy like? A. Following Bandura’s hypothesis, they are less likely to start a task, put in less effort and stop sooner when it gets hard (Bandura, 1977). But self-efficacy differs from one area to another, so it can be low for studying and high for something else (Bandura, 2006), and although low self-efficacy can come with low mood, it is not depression in itself. If a sense that nothing is within your power lasts a long time and leaves you drained, see the lack of motivation guide as well.

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